It’s not the kind of joke that requires the stitching of sides. Nonetheless, a joke it is. On the day Neil Young announced the title of his new album, posters on Young fansites around the world proudly proclaimed that they too had “got it”. Chrome Dreams, you see, is the name subsequently given (not by Young, but by bootleggers) to the “lost” album that Young recorded but never released in 1977.

Still, uniting the abortive 30-year-old project and its nominal successor is a wonky symmetry. That one contained Powderfinger and Like a Hurricane, two classics that eventually found their way on to other records. This one makes a home for three songs that have long circulated among Young fans – most excitingly, Ordinary People. Young’s tribute to the common man was the centerpiece of many late 1980s shows, and, clocking in at 18 minutes, it’s hardly inconspicuous here.

It’s supposed to be redemptive – and perhaps in 1988, when blue-collar rock was an innovation, it probably was. But, by the time the lugubrious epic gets to the ninth verse, all this mawkish talk of “nose-to-the-stone people” and “patch-of-ground people” is enough to make you want to hail a taxi in time for happy hour at Boujis.

Much more tolerable, in fact, are the two other “old” songs. Banjos and low male harmonies account for most of the extraneous sounds on Boxcar (originally earmarked for 1988’s Freedom), which is all the better for it. On Beautiful Bluebird, he intensifies the spirit of the 22-year-old original, tremulously imparting the words with the delirious air of someone gazing from the windows of an Appalachian carehome.

The sense of a man in the middle of some great cosmic audit finds its match on The Believer. Here, Young hints at an Earth-centred mysticism that takes flight on the concluding starlit rapture of The Way and Spirit Road. As sundry Crazy Horse alumni chug out a messy, kinetic riff on the latter, Young celebrates the nomadic urges of the song’s youthful protagonist. You want it to go on twice as long, but it conks out gloriously at six minutes.

By contrast, No Hidden Path actually is twice as long. Of course, ever since his old label Geffen sued him for “not sounding like Neil Young”, no one would dare suggest to Neil Young that he edit himself. But just as Young long earned the right to do as he pleases, his loyal, patch-of-ground fans have long since earned the right to download the decent tunes while discreetly setting his indulgences aside. And on Chrome Dreams II, they’d be well advised to exercise it.

(Warner Brothers)

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