Prairie Wind

If anyone has earned the right to coast on his reputation, it’s Neil Young. Back when he could’ve kept churning out reasonable facsimiles of his 1972 acoustic monster, Harvest, he veered left to make noisy, weird, and frequently scorching rock records, often alienating his fans in the process. But after spewing uneven, but occasionally inspired, music through the '80s, Neil is on a serious losing streak. He hasn’t made a decent record since the early '90s and Prairie Wind is the fourth in a row that can fairly be described as dreadful. In spirit, it’s a watered-down version of his 1992 record, Harvest Moon—which itself was a waterlogged reprise of Harvest. The mostly acoustic songs are familiar and unobtrusive enough to momentarily fool you into assuming this is just Neil on autopilot, but it’s worse. “That song from 9/11 keeps ringing in my head/I’ll always remember something Chris Rock said,” Young warbles on the cringe-worthy “No Wonder.” Elsewhere, strings and background choirs try to supply gravitas, but Young sounds less like an old sage than a doddering coot.