Album: Neil Young

Chrome Dreams II, Reprise

Although prolific, Neil Young's 21st-century output – of which this is the eighth album – hardly lifts the spirit in the manner of his work from the Sixties and Seventies, a situation exacerbated by his occasional archival releases of concert recordings from earlier eras. Young himself compares Chrome Dreams II to After the Goldrush and Freedom, but one will search in vain here for a song as strong as "Rockin' in the Free World".

Instead, there's a few plodding country-rockers laced with pedal steel and drab homilies, like "Ever After", "Beautiful Bluebird" and "Boxcar"; some lumbering Crazy Horse-style riff-rockers such as "Spirit World" and "Dirty Old Man", which contains the album's best couplet: "It's a battle with the bottle, I win it all right / But I lost a few rounds in the bar last night"; and one " epic", the 18-minute "Ordinary People", which observes outsider functionaries like drug dealers and arms traders as they go about their work, and is almost as stultifying as the long pieces on Greendale, a situation not helped by its sounding like Springsteen covering an Eagles tune. Doesn't he have a hobby he could be getting on with instead?

Download this: 'Dirty Old Man', 'Spirit World'