This review was written by CL Political Editor Wayne Garcia.

Neil Young

Fork in the Road

(Reprise)

Neil Young seems to toss off discs these days like a bad blogger: quick and topical, without much depth or time to think deeper thoughts. That’s a shame, because Young still sounds great, still has a fire in the belly to make hard-grungey music and now has the wisdom of the Old Man that he once wrote so famously about.

Fork in the Road is the latest near-throwaway from Young, a cross between his heavy-handed political genre efforts (Living With War) and the thematic/cinematic concept discs (Greendale). It is ostensibly about his beloved LincVolt, a Lincoln that Young converted to run on electricity. He uses the car as his metaphor for a lot of things that are wrong with the old U S of A, including our addiction to oil. “Fill ’er up/ She’s not the car that she used to be” he intones in “Fuel Line.” Har-har.

This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...