Neil Young's LIVING WITH WAR

Yesterday Neil Young released a devastatingly beautiful piece of musical and political pop art - a gospel/folk/metal cry from America's musical heartland called LIVING WITH WAR - that streams free now at a server near you. I'm ashamed to say that it was not my own GenX nor the younger kids to make the penultimate antiwar, anti-Bush rock opus. I would've thought Radiohead or The Strokes could have done it. But, bands like these abandoned this low hanging fruit to an old-timer like Neil Young, a proven maestro of enduring protest song-craft (e.g., CSN&Y's "Ohio") to put out this soulful and indignantly righteous kick to Bush's lyin' solar plexus. Heck, maybe it took a Canadian to do it right!

The album's opener, "After The Garden Is Gone," centers upon death, like all great lyric poetry. Here, the topic is the death of our environment.

Won't need no shadow man running the government
Won't need no stinking war!
Won't need no haircut
Won't need no shoe-shine
After the Garden Is Gone
After the Garden Is Gone
What Will people Do?
After The Garden Is Gone
What Will People Say
After The Garden Is Gone?

In case it's not self-evident, Young means our Planet Earth by the Garden that will be gone, and this could easily serve as the first Peak Oil Anthem or maybe the musical companion piece to Gore's new flick, "An Inconvenient Truth." Anyway, people can read all about the death of our planet in Jared Diamond's Collapse, or Time magazine.

Musically, Young is rocking out in high style, with shimmering guitar leads running through gorgeous, crashing chords backed by loosely rocking bass and drums. The musical kicker to this album is the 100-voice gospel choir - something that could have come across gimmicky, but doesn't - which makes all this Ragged Glory noise so transcendent. But on this first track, the 100 voices are more muted, simply doubling Neil's melody like Gregorian chanters.

Next, the title track, "Living With War," opens with trumpets echoing the distorto-Spanish guitar lead, to haunting effect. The choir becomes more present now, sining this heartrending lullaby along with Young, which adds a full, rich dimension to the recording's traditional power trio sound.

"Living With War" is a lingering beauty of a tune, full of shame and a glint of hope, or resolve at least. If you've ever read Chris Hedges' "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", this could be it's musical equivalent.

"Restless Consumer" and "Shock and Awe" are pissed off rockers - the first about excessive consumption of lies and products and the latter about being duped by politicians into a no-good war and looking back with cynicism. The best line in the song is ...

History was the cruel judge of overconfidence

"Flags of Freedom" is pure Bob Dylan, whom Young name checks in the lyrics. A song of sons sent to war in the name of false ideals. There's even a harmonica solo!

Of course, the album's piece de resistance is the incomparable "Let's Impeach The President," which has the stadium sing-along-ability of Queen's "We Will Rock You," but propped up mightily by a 100-voice choir that may as well be the millions of voices of the majority of Americans who want Bush out. It should be the temporary National Anthem, and Young should release a Spanish language version.

By now, the lyrics are becoming well known:

Let's impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

The outro of "Let's Impeach the President" brilliantly employs an audio montage of Bush's contradictory bravado and nonchalance about catching Usama bin Laden; Bush's prewar lies about WMD in Iraq, and subsequent lying about ever telling lies in the first place. All the while, Mr. Young and his mighty gospel choir chant "Flip" then "Flop" to punctuate Bush's self-contradicting bullsh*t.

"Looking for a Leader" is about the nation's forthcoming search for a decent man to occupy the oval office, a man "with the great spirit on his side." Young name even checks Barak Obama and Colin Powell, whom Young thinks may still become a leader "to right what he's done wrong." (Personally, I think Colin Powell should never be any position of power again, but here Young betrays his Republican sympathies a little. It's hard to mind it in the midst of such a grandiose, accurate denunciation of the Bush regime. A musical "J'accuse!" that covers the waterfront of Bush's high crimes).

That this album ends with an a cappella version of "America the Beautiful," faithfully sung by Neil Young's 100-voice choir, sort of speaks for itself. Perhaps Young was trying to inoculate himself from those FOX NEWS "Canadian Rocker Attacks America" headlines. But the album is so downright patriotic anyway, with a romantic's love for America underlying nearly every track, that America the Beautiful probably was an unnecessary addition to this record. But it is indeed beautiful.