Review:
“Rust Never Sleeps, its aphoristic title drawn from an intended advertising slogan, was an album of new songs, some of them recorded on Neil Young’s 1978 concert tour. His strongest collection since Tonight’s the Night, its obvious antecedent was Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, and, as Dylan did, Young divided his record into acoustic and electric sides while filling his songs with wildly imaginative imagery.” WR “A serious meditation on aging, it paradoxically made Young appear younger” BL and it was the album on which “Young invents grunge.” BL
“The leadoff track, My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) (repeated in an electric version at album’s end as Hey Hey, My My [Into the Black] with slightly altered lyrics), is the most concise and knowing description of the entertainment industry ever written.” WR “It was fitting that Kurt Cobain quoted ‘Hey Hey, My My’ in his suicide note, for half of Rust Never Sleeps boasts the grungiest guitar ever.” BL
Thrasher “describes Young’s parallel artistic quest in an extended metaphor that also reflected the album’s overall theme – the inevitability of deterioration and the challenge of overcoming it.” WR
“Elsewhere, Young featured a clutch of brilliant but subdued country-rockers.” BL He “spent the rest of the album demonstrating that his chief weapons against rusting were his imagination and his daring, creating an archetypal album that encapsulated his many styles on a single disc with great songs – in particular the remarkable Powderfinger – unlike any he had written before.” WR
Review Source(s):
BLBlender Magazine’s 100 Greatest American Albums (10/08)
1.0
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2.5
