You'd never guess the dude could still put an album this solid out there, but here it is, epic in scope, stuffed with good guitar solos, adventurous within the space it outlines for itself. There's crunch and bluster straight off of Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, with resigned ackonwledgement and dismissal of the times and the ways they are a-changin'. Scarcely a step's been lost.
The three epic-length songs are the highlights, giving themselves room to breathe, wielding repetition and evolution to build expansive spaces, Walk Like a Giant and Drifting Back laying claim to huge tracts of space and time, respectively. Despite the length of the songs and the album itself, the listening experience rarely drags - the band is tight and they know what they're doing. They're indulgent, but not self-indulgent. They're indulging you.
Of course there's still Young's voice at the heart of it all, and if you didn't like it 40 years ago you won't like it now; it's changed surprisingly little. For me, it's a miss a lot of the time, just too reedy and strained, but I can suffer it in the name of some vintage jams 4/5
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