Chrome Never Sleeps.('Chrome Dreams II')(Sound recording review)

Neil Young's umpteenth studio album, "Chrome Dreams II" (Reprise), is a puzzle, from its title on down. The original "Chrome Dreams," as Young diehards know, is an unreleased album from 1977 whose songs included "Pocahontas," "Will to Love," "Like a Hurricane," and "Homegrown." This record, ostensibly a sequel--though who releases a sequel to something that was never released in the first place?--is, more accurately, an inverted image. While the songs from the first "Chrome Dreams" were scattered over a series of successive albums, this album includes songs written during disparate time periods, stitched together and brought to life: Young's Frankenstein, you could say.

Young works in many modes--pastoral country, moody folk, lumbering rock--and all of them are represented here. The album opener, "Beautiful Bluebird," is a pretty, mellow ballad with airy harmonies; "Boxcar," the second song, is a darker and riskier meditation on identity. Then comes the record's centerpiece, "Ordinary People." The song is a leftover from the late eighties, when Young was playing with a full horn section and calling his band the Bluenotes. A massive ode to our collective humanity, it runs for nine long verses and more than eighteen minutes: that's three times as long as "Like a Rolling Stone" and longer even than "Sister Ray." ...