One of many defining works from Neil Younger’s first imperial section, On the Seaside finds our frazzled celebrity hippie hero drifting additional away from the slick mainstream sounds of his L.A. contemporaries. Launched in 1974, two years after the gargantuan industrial success of Harvest, it’s the ultimate entry in his intentionally profession derailing ‘Ditch Trilogy’, that uncooked sequence of radio-unfriendly albums during which he principally recorded himself having a chronic nervous breakdown.
Following on from Time Fades Away and Tonight’s the Night time – which was recorded earlier than On the Seaside, however launched afterwards – it’s a equally bleak, stoned and bleary howl on the moon during which Younger wrestles along with his ambivalent emotions about stardom (the acerbic For the Turnstiles and the burned out title observe, during which Younger makes doing a radio interview sound like essentially the most desolate factor on earth) whereas documenting the broiling madness of America within the mid-Seventies.
The completely spooked and sinister Revolution Blues is written from the angle of Charles Manson himself. Haunting album nearer Ambulance Blues is an enigmatic epic (key lyric: “It’s laborious to say the that means of this music”) which however encapsulates the report’s core themes: paranoia, alienation and an aching want to flee from the current.
Younger was on such an impressed song-writing streak at this level, he was seemingly capable of pluck indelible melodies and imagery from the ether at will. An apocalyptic masterpiece.
