Greendale

A few years back, Neil Young and Crazy Horse released "Greendale," a concept album about the shooting of a police officer in a small town. Unlike many albums Young has put out over the years, this song cycle is less rock, and more ambient. He displays prodigious storytelling power here, as he talks about the incident through the eyes of all that are touched by it. He is so sensitive, and, through simple narration, he displays the sadness that surrounds tragedy, and how tragedies stem from other tragedies.

The story mainly follows the character, Sun Green, whose brother shoots a police officer while transporting drugs. The Green family is chased by the media, whose harassment causes Grandpa Green to have a heart attack fighting "for the right to remain anonymous." This story reflects Young's feelings about the media, and the prices of living in the modern age. After a while, though, Young's story strays, and rather than focusing on this tragedy as a lens through which one can analyze society, he, like his character, Sun Green, simple begins to vent about thinks in the world he doesn't like.Keep in mind; this is an album of songwriting. The instrumentation is repetitive, and basically boring. If that were the point, this album would lose points itself. But the songwriting, even if it gets old, stays, for the most part, deep and biting.