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(Kevin Baker's review)
I'm not a big Neil Young fan in all honesty. His voice can get annoying on a level that makes Dylan sound like Greg Lake, his songwriting is often hit-and-miss, and he's VERY unpredictable. Plus, he's Canadian. Us Southern men don't need him anyhow.... Yet, I like most of the stuff on here. Mr. Young found a winning combination here, and I genuinely enjoy most of the songs. The highlight is of course, the opener, Cinnamon Girl. It's really one of my favorite songs overall. It's a rocker, and easily the best rocker here, maybe the best he's ever done. The title track is a somewhat country-ish ode to goin' home, Round and Round is a lazy ballad that d r a g s along at a snail's pace....in a bad way. However, Down By The River is pretty good. It IS overlong for such a simplistic song, but it's not bad. The Losing End, meanwhile, is stupid. It's basically a lame-o country shuffle. Running Dry is sappy but bearable. However, the closing track, Cowgirl In The Sand, a classic, and rightfully so. I can stand the 10 and a half minutes of it. OK, so maybe I only like 4 out of 7 of them. Mathematically, that means I like over half of it, so it gets at least a 6, plus a bonus point....7! I can add!!!
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
After this album came out, during the 1980s, Neil Young put out a variety of albums that showed him in different personae. Let's see, there was Trans, Neil as technophile, This Note's For You, Neil as blues musician, Everybody's Rockin' by Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks, Neil as rockabilly star, and more. At any rate, outside of those experiments, there are two main Neil personae to remember; 1) Neil as rocking electric guitar stud, and 2) Neil as eccentric folkie. Comes A Time is an example of the second of these personae, and is IMHO the best of Neil's country/folk albums, along with After The Gold Rush and Harvest, though the tone on Comes A Time is not as solemn as it often is on those albums.
OK, the songs, all of which have redeeming features. "Goin' Back" is the first song and it's this indecipherable fantasy sung to a great, slow tune: "In a foreign land/ There were creatures at play/ Running hand in hand/ Leaving nowhere to stay". Most of the songs on this album ("Look Out For My Love," "Lotta Love," "Peace Of Mind," "Human Highway," "Already One," "Field of Oppourtunity") seem to have Neil singing the first-person narrative of an insecure country boy with problems in his love life. Neil ends the album with a song called "Motorcycle Mama" with an electric guitar accompaniment, and a singalong version of Ian and Sylvia's tune "Four Strong Winds," which is about Neil Young's own homeland -- by which I mean, of course, Canada. Nicollete Larson sings backup on a lot of the songs, her voice is very pretty and you can hear its nuances. There are plenty of back-up musicians performing to Neil's pleasant guitar and sappy voice, all of them very low-key.
If you're still reading this review at this point, and you haven't already decided to dislike this album, then you'll probably appreciate it for the classic that it is. All of the songs have great melodies except for "Peace of Mind" and "Motorcycle Mama" which drag a bit, it's all stuff you can sing along with, and the lyrics are really evocative stuff especially if you live out in the country. No, "Comes A Time" doesn't fit any country-western stereotypes, though it is an album to hear at dawn in a meadow. Give this album an 8 unless you're a hardcore city-dweller, in which case you can give it a 5.
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(reviewed by Philip Maddox)
A double live album to document Neil Young's Broken Arrow tour (which I attended! Yay!), the band sounds VERY slow and lethargic here. I'm not sure exactly why. Their energy is pretty low throughout. This isn't really a bad thing, though - in fact, the lack of energy makes a few of the dronier numbers on the record (Broken Arrow's "Slip Away"; Zuma's "Dangerbird") really achieve their intended effect, pounding out slow riffs to attempt to hypnotize the audience with sound. The only problem with this is that they get carried away, sometimes jamming on 2 or 3 chords for upwards of 10 minutes. It's not bad if you're in the mood, but you have to be in the mood, or you WILL get bored. Consider yourself warned.
Outside of these longer numbers, you get a pretty first rate track selection with some good guitar work, great vocals, and a cool atmosphere due to the aforementioned lack of energy. Tunes like "When You Dance", "Pocahontas", and "Barstool Blues" sound really good in this setting in particular. Mesmerizing tunes. Bunches of other great tunes are on here. There are only two songs on here I consider weak - "When Your Lonely Heart Breaks" never gets going and will put you to sleep even if you ARE in the mood, and a slow, bluesy "Mr. Soul", which is about a hundredth as good as the original Buffalo Springfield tune. Plus, there's this awesome song on here called "Prisoners Of Rock And Roll", which I'd never heard before (due to its inclusion on the really obscure Life album), but rules a bunch. Fantatsic rocker. Oh yeah. Good album and all, but it's definately not the best place to start with Young. These tunes are almost always harder to get into than their studio counterparts. Once you do, though, it's a good record (and a really underrated one at that - most people really got bored with this, but I dig it).
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