Sleeps with Angels

Sleeps With Angels
THIS ALBUM WAS NOT GIVEN A LOT OF GOOD REVIEWS BY THE CRITICS(?).MAYBE THEY ONLY LOOK AT SONGS OF SO-CALLED COMMERCIAL VALUE....
MY TAKE ON THIS (AND THIS CD ) IS MOST "MIDDLE OF THE ROAD" POP MUSIC IS CRAP,SO LISTEN TO A SINGER-SONGWRITER WHOSE LYRICS AND MUSIC MEAN SOMETHING.THAT MY FRIENDS IS NEIL YOUNG...AND ALTHOUGH THIS ALBUM WAS NOT ONE I HAD 'TIL RECENTLY...IT'S GREAT!!AFTER NEIL RE-INVENTED HIMSELF WITH FREEDOM,AND RAGGED GLORY,IN THE LATE 80'S AND EARLY 90'S,SLEEPS WITH ANGELS MAY NOT HAVE CONTINUED THE SAME VEIN,WITH THE DIVERSION OF GRUNGE IDOL,KURT COBAIN'S UNTIMELY DEATH NO DOUBT A REASON FOR THIS CD.
MY HEART AND PRIME OF LIFE ARE TERRIFIC BALLADS,DRIVEBY,A BIT OF A COMMENTARY OF LIFE,AND OF COURSE HE DOES HAVE AT LEAST TWO TRACKS TO COMMEMORATE THE SAD PASSING OF A TROUBLED MUSICIAN,STARTING WITH "SLEEPS WITH ANGELS"
AS HE DOES,NEIL THROWS IN AN UP-TEMPO PIECE ABOUT SOCIAL INJUSTICE (PIECE OF CRAP),AND THIS DOES SHOW HIS MANY MOODS ,BUT MOSTLY HOW HE HAS LIVED AND LOVED LIFE,AND STAYED RELATABLE FOR 30 ODD YEARS.
LONG MAY HE RUN!!

I don't want to totally put down "Sleeps With Angels", but I'm not overly impressed. Unless you are a really big Neil Young buff, you probably won't like this.

I found tracks 1 and 12 quite cheesy. Tracks 2-3, 5-6 and 9 are pretty good. I found tracks 4 and 10 to have some good qualities, but majorly lacking. And I really didn't "get" tracks 7-8 and 11 at all. The tracks seem to rotate between dark/grungy and corny!

This album is quite different than what you might be used to from Neil Young. Unless you are part of a small segment of hardcore fans, you are better off getting something else. Neil Young has a lot of good stuff. If this is the first Neil Young CD you hear, you may be lead to discount him to easily. In that case, do your self a favour and get something else.

After returning back to his acoustic country-tinged roots on Harvest Moon and Unplugged, Neil Young reunited again with Crazy Horse for 1994's Sleeps With Angels. While their previous collaboration, the excellent Ragged Glory, showed a feeling of resilience amongst the grunge, Sleeps With Angels is closer in spirit to Tonight's The Night in the fact that it's a very dour release. Many of the tracks have Neil playing piano and whether it's on playful tracks like "My Heart" and "A Dream That Can Last" or the melancholy tunes "Western Hero" and "Driveby", his lines, as well as his lyrics, give the feeling of a wake. The title track rages of paranoia with its frequent changes in volume while the Neil's vocals sound like a cry for help on the plodding "Blue Eden." Even the quieter arrangements of "Trans Am' and "Safeway Cart" give a sense of sorrow that works very well. "Piece of [...]" and "Change Your Mind" are more in tune with their most well tunes as the former is Neil's best rocker since "Rockin' in the Free World" while the latter is a jam piece that has great guitar solos from Young and Frank Sampedro and is at least five minutes too long. Also worth noting is that "Train of Love" and "Western Hero" are essentially the same tune with different lyrics. All told, while this isn't one of his (or their) best albums, Sleeps with Angels is a strong release from a musician who continues to challenge himself while most of his contemporaries are resting on their laurels.

This cd came out and just vanished, forgotten. Luckily, I picked it up a short time later to fill out some of my Young collection.

It's a 5 star affair with the showcase song 'Change Your Mind', one of Neil's brilliant songs from the 90s.

Songs like 'The Prime of Life' and 'Drive By' grow on you after a while.

Don't miss out on this great cd.

Sleeps With Angels does not fit comfortably into Neil Young's Crazy Horse canon. Granted, Neil's singing has often lent a certain depth to the Horse's bonehead playing. The Horse can create a backdrop with the best of him, as its sheer repetition gives the songs almost a primal flow. Take "Cortez the Killer" for instance -- or any of dozens of songs, for that matter. But here, even musically, the Horse ceases to be itself. The songs don't drive so much as they meander. On an album about dying, the music perfectly mimics death -- sinister, calm, sometimes even ominously pristine. And overall confused. .

Maybe because the Horse is out of its element, this album seems off. It reminds me of After the Gold Rush in tone, in places, but with more going on and even more of a dark shadow over it. Part of that created by the music. Part of it because the music does not seem to know where it is going. This shadow, of course, was Kurt Cobain's death -- and the seeming justification of this suicide with a Neil Young quote ("It's better to burn out than to fade away"). To this day, Neil Young will not talk about the Cobain connection, as I understand it. But one does not have to look far to see it -- or hear it, in this case.

Neil's singing is its most harrowing since Tonight's the Night. His voice squeaks in falsetto lyrics about love right on top of lyrics about death. The songs do not always seem to be directly about Cobain, as many are framed in stories that do not match this particular case. But they bear the mood. "My Heart" is pure pain, one of Neil's best love ballads -- the Horse at its sparest and most understated, singing with Neil in train wreck gospel harmony. It's love and devotion with the sense that something is about to happen (It's not to late, I've got to get somewhere") .... Like a dream someone might have on death row, of pastures and sheep and things being different.

"Change Your Mind" comes from the other direction, reading like a belated last letter to its subject -- on why not to do it, on how love can stop it. "Distracting you from this must be the one you love, must be the one who's magic touch can change your mind." A cry that rings hollow in the face of events, and: a message to future victims? An implication of the love Cobain hadn't gotten? It's a song impossible to construe but powerful in the 14 driven minutes for which it weaves. Too long, maybe. Necessary, yes.

"Driveby" could be postmarked as the theme song for falling apart and dying too young, with three chords dragging like chains, some Spanish guitar, and the chorus just repeating that one word "Driveby" -- that one word saying so much about what it is for any young person to die, whatever the means.

Other standouts are the "Western Hero" and "Train of Love" set -- two songs with identical melodies, sounding like a poor Crazy Horse version of Harvest or Harvest Moon. But making these songs just sparse enough to be believed: the first about the fall of Western civilization from outlaws and soldiers to big business and heartlessness. The second, just as pretty and sad, but this time a declaration of love, hard to say whether desperate or joyous -- but vaguely apocalyptic.

And finally, there's the precarious vision of hope at the end, "A Dream That Can Last. This song, to me, is among the most fascinating in Young's catalog. Like the others, cannot be its mood and images are of death. Indeed, the drifty tack piano sounds like some kind of church hymn -- Crazy Horse, now, like some skewed gospel choir. One lone base drum provides the beat, pounding like a message from the mountain. In a way, to me, this sounds like Neil Young's stab at Kurt Cobain's funeral song. The angst, the pain that he had lived with are stripped away -- replaced by clarity that seems like heaven, and couldn't be achieved in life, "I feel like I died and went to heaven . . . I saw the present, I saw the past, and when I wake up I know that it's a dream that can last." Obviously, with Cobain, there was no "waking up" -- but maybe that was what makes it "last." Does heaven exist? Who knows. Neither does Neil -- but the hope is enough. This hope does not sound like it precedes death, it sounds like it follows, and thus conquers, it.

Musically, this is not one of the best Neil albums. The sound is strange, Horse is out of its element, Neil write songs as though in a trance -- some of which work, some of which don't. But flawed or not, this was the first Neil album since Rust Never Sleeps that sounded like it had to be written. Neil has made better albums, but few as raw, emotional, prophetic, and purely ambitious...... so much so that, in the end, the nonconformity and overreach of this album serve it well: as a tribute to Kurt Cobain, a struggle between a mind and itself, and an image of both the abyss and the possibility of a light at the bottom of it. That pain does bring redemption; that death brings love.