Review: Neil Young is political as ever on 'Peace Trail'

While many of his rock peers spend their late-era careers recording cover albums and embarking on wildly lucrative tours, Neil Young, 71, is as prolific and fiery as ever. And given the heightened political climate into which he releases his latest studio album Peace Trail  (** and a half out of ****, out Fri.), there's no shortage of societal ills for the legendary singer-songwriter to condemn, his trademark reedy voice only slightly shakier with age.

But in 2016, protest music looks, and sounds, much different than the guitar-strumming screeds Young has spent his career recording. As this point, he's documented a half-century of injustice in song, from early favorites like Southern Man and Ohio to more recent crusades against Monsanto and big agribusiness. And from the sounds of Peace Trail, the weight of the world is still sitting heavy on Young’s shoulders. His new songs pulse with immediacy, moving down a checklist of 2016’s most salient political topics, particularly the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Over pow-wow drums and acoustic guitars, highlights Indian Givers and the album's title track paint a dramatic picture of the conflict at Standing Rock, the songs’ heroes fighting for the fundamental right to their land. "There’s a battle ragin’ on the sacred land / Our brothers and sisters had to take a stand," he sings on Indian Givers. Meanwhile, John Oaks tells a story of police brutality from a different perspective, focusing on a farmer struggling to protect his workers, killed in his truck by an officer's gun.

Peace Trail sees Young in Woody Guthrie mode, disinterested in beautiful turns of phrase, opting for spare arrangements and plainspoken storytelling. At its best, it's almost comforting to hear him paint precarious current events as noble, good-versus-evil crusades. But as is the case with many of his later, social justice-minded recordings, he walks a fine line between truth-telling and ornery. On Peace Trail's weakest moments, Young sounds less like a soothsaying voice of reason and more like an old man railing against new technology he doesn’t understand. At times, that's intentional. "I'm lost in this new generation, left me behind it seems / Listening to the shadow of Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze sounding like TV," he sings on My Pledge over disembodied Auto-Tuned vocals.

As valid as Young's complaints are, that technology has rendered humans devoid of empathy, he often adds flourishes of electronic music that make his point too literally, particularly the chorus of automated voices on album closer My New Robot. And for a new generation of listeners, who’ve connected with the rallying cries of Kendrick Lamar’s Alright and the charged imagery of Beyonce’s Formation video, Peace Trail's guitar-strumming storytelling may seem quaint in comparison.

Still, even if he’s not the voice speaking for the new wave of civil unrest, Young’s is still an essential one, with Peace Trail the latest entry in a storied songbook spanning 60 years of protest. Recently, Bob Dylan made history by winning the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the American musical tradition; while Dylan may be his generation’s poet, Young is the dogged historian, still standing with the protesters, decades after Dylan left them behind.