136. Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (May 1969)

1. Cinnamon Girl*

2. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

3. Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)*

4. Down by the River*

5. The Losing End

6. Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets)

7. Cowgirl in the Sand

****

I'm switching to a 5-star rating system, because if I'm being honest I don't really understand letter grades. I'm Australian! We don't use them here! I suppose I could go with a percentage system (which we do use), with grades of Credit through High Distinction. But no.

This is easily one of the most important guitar albums ever recorded. The attention getters - the sprawling "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand" - feature hypnotic grooves and skronky, one note guitar solos unlike anything else we've had at this point. The big, dumb power chord riff on "Cinnamon Girl" is timeless. The playing on these tracks is angular, rambling, and somewhat atonal, and it's kind of a new language for the electric guitar - something that moves away from the blues predominant at the time. 

The great thing about Young, though, is that he's not just some oddball experimentalist. He has a great grasp of a catchy (if peculiar) pop song, and the tracks on this album are all incredibly listenable. "Cinnamon Girl" could almost be considered a punk rock song (or at least, has a riff worthy of early Stooges), but it's followed by the mellow country rock of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere", which leads into the beautiful and haunting folk rock number "Round & Round". Side two features more country rock, and "Running Dry" shifts from the guitar-centric nature of things with the introduction of a fiddle. 

The most enduring numbers, though, are the lengthy jams that close both sides. These songs were both written while Young had a fever, and then recorded more-or-less live with no overdubs and spliced together from a few different takes. The results are a pair of songs that are hallucinatory and hypnotic. Guitarist Danny Whitten provides rambling grooves over which Young's fragile vocals soar, and Young's tense bursts of lead guitar are a lesson in minimalism to every bloated guitar hero out there. 

The "live in the studio" feel also gives these songs a great sense of spontaneity. Apparently there was virtually no rehearsal, and most of the songs were captured in one or two takes. So the album has a loose, jazzy feel to it. It could certainly be more polished, but the ramshackle, "lightning in a bottle" feel is a large part of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere's charm. 

So, no bad songs and four great ones. This isn't peak Young - he'd release albums like After the Gold Rush and On the Beach, after all - but in its best moments it's mesmerising.