Ruins is little more than deftly executed nothingness, a custom-crafted, neo-folk sleeping pill. Its sheer vacuity falls, somewhat unjustly, on the shoulders of Ramsey, a so-so singer who shouldn't have to take the rap for what was apparently a band-wide lack of originality. Still, Ramsey's soggy delivery sops up what little mystery and friction the music might have mustered. That life-sucking quality extends to non-original material, as well: Ruins's cover of Roxy Music's "More than This" is an easy-listening, VH1 nightmare at its most unrelenting. It's also the disc's first single. Someone hand me the drill. (*)
-- Hobart Rowland
Neil Young and Crazy Horse
Year of the Horse
Reprise
These represent Neil Young's fifth and sixth live discs of the '90s (following Weld, Arc and Unplugged) -- throw in Lucky Thirteen, and he has seven discs of recycled material this decade, in addition to six CDs of new material. As such, they may not exactly be irrelevant, but they do pose a niggling question: Why is it okay to release this and keep so much other material locked away on the shelf? Young has to be the biggest major rock artist with the most significant chunks of back catalog unavailable on CD. Great swatches of his agonized '70s output are nowhere in sight, while the trilogy of terror from the '80s -- Trans, Everybody's Rockin' and Old Ways -- is available only as overpriced imports. And there's the small matter of this long-delayed sequel to Decade, an opus that promises another pile of material both new and recycled, though by the time it sees a record store shelf it'll probably have to be titled Millennium.
Noodling around on less-than-essential toss offs such as this one certainly isn't a crime, but it does seem like creative wheel-spinning. Oh, well -- at least this isn't the same old same old. Though a couple of tunes resurrected from Zuma -- "Barstool Blues" and "Danger Bird" -- sound workmanlike at best when compared to the endlessly fascinating originals, Young does shake things up a bit. The beautiful "Pocahontas" receives an amped-up electric crunch, while chestnuts "Mr. Soul" and "Human Highway" are rendered in an acoustic fashion (though "Mr. Soul" got the same treatment on Unplugged -- is Young even paying attention to what he's putting out these days?).
The only truly pointless inclusions are three tunes from Broken Arrow, which get extended jams. This wouldn't be that bad, except that they were extended jams on the studio album. (If Young wanted to include something from Broken Arrow, why didn't he throw in "Music Arcade," the sole acoustic number amidst that album's electric rumble, an elliptically resonant tune with the potential to become as popular as "Sugar Mountain"?)
Consumer alert: This represents 85 minutes spread over two discs; junk one song and you could've fit it all on one CD and saved a couple of bucks. Right now, Young might be advised to back off the feverish pace at which he has been releasing product, lest he fritter away all the goodwill he garnered with his amazing comeback a decade ago. (**)
-- David Kronke
CDs rated on a one to five star scale.
