Neil Young - Landing On Water (Remastered) (2022) [Hi-Res]

A big, bombastic synth-rock album by Neil Young? Linn drums? Synth bass? Coming, as it did, immediately after Young settled out of court with a record company that had sued him for making non-commercial records, LANDING ON WATER could easily be seen as not only the oddest of Young's mid-'80s streak of oddball records, but also as a big joke, the punch line being, "Here's your commercial album, Mr. Geffen. Have fun selling it." Or maybe he actually means it: "Hippie Dream," whose chorus goes, "The wooden ships/Were just a hippie dream," puts a bullet through the memory of his old folkie buddies Crosby, Stills & Nash. And while "Pressure" does a pretty good imitation of Billy Joel's synth-rock hit "Pressure," it's followed by "Drifter," which manages to put a bullet through the much more recent memory of David Geffen ("Don't try to tell me what I gotta do to fit") while effectively updating an ON THE BEACH-ish blues structure for the electronic age. In short it is, despite all appearances, a Neil Young album, and it foreshadows the giant rebirth that was about to come.

"Backed only by co-producer Danny Kortchmar on guitar and Steve Jordan on drums, with all three playing synthesizers, Neil Young turns in an album that attempts to mix the raunchy rock thrust of his Crazy Horse-style music with contemporary trends in pop, especially the tendency to turn the drums way up in the mix. It's an uneasy combination in which Jordan's forceful drumming dominates the tracks, with Young's vocals nearly buried. But that only means that the production has ruined a group of songs few of which were any good anyway. The only one that offers the promise of being one of Young's better efforts is "Hippie Dream," a sober criticism of what became of '60s idealism in general and Young's erstwhile bandmate David Crosby in particular. But if Landing on Water was not a good album, at least it seemed to point Young away from the stylistic dabbling of his last three albums and back toward the kind of rock he did best, and at least some of his fans returned as a result, giving him a slight uptick in sales." (William Ruhlmann, AMG)

Neil Young, guitar, synthesizer, vocals
Danny Kortchmar, guitar, synthesizer, vocals
Steve Jordan, drums, synthesizer, vocals
The San Francisco Boys Chorus

Recorded Aug. 1983 until März 1986 at Broken Arrow Ranch, Woodside, CA and Record One, Los Angeles
Produced by Neil Young & Danny Kortchmar

Digitally remastered