Neil Young The Monsanto Years

Neil Young is often at his best when he’s got his fur up about something, and that’s certainly the case on The Monsanto Years, Young’s third album in the past two years. He has described the new album as an “ecologically/environmentally focused” recording and certainly, with song titles like “Big Box” and especially “A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop,” which name-checks Starbucks (one of several targets called out by Young directly on the album), it’s not hard to detect that he has a specific agenda in play. But the real story behind the scenes of The Monsanto Years is the pairing of Young with Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real, the California-based quartet that provides a strong musical engine for the record’s ragged, guitar-driven material—bringing to mind the similar energy and song quality Young captured in the ’90s through his collaborations with Pearl Jam. The combined results produce what might be Young’s finest album since 2012’s Psychedelic Pill.