Uncut writes a long and nice review of the London show where RED SUN was played:
Neil Young & Crazy Horse: London O2 Arena, June 17, 2013
by John Mulvey
If, at this late date, you still need proof Neil Young is not a man to be trusted, something akin to that arrives about two and a quarter hours into his show at London’s O2 Arena.
By this point, Young has managed a grand total of 15 songs, mostly in the resilient company of Crazy Horse, and is making his first extended address to the crowd. “Frankly, a lot of times tonight we kinda sucked,” he says. “But, with what we do, that happens.”
One can understand the second part of Young’s statement: controlling such wild and capricious electric music is a necessarily tricky business. But what, bewilderingly, constitutes a non-sucking show for Neil Young? It is hard to recall, from my limited experience, one of his shows that has been simultaneously so ominous, joyful, ambitious and – a real shock, this, considering the unsteady reputation of Crazy Horse – tight. Perhaps a good night for Young resembles the prickly evening he spent in Newcastle last week, enjoying a faintly adversarial relationship with some sections of the crowd? Or the reception accorded “Walk Like A Giant” on Saturday, when substantial portions of the Dublin audience reportedly fed their boos into the song’s cacophonous end section?
“No other band of their stature would take this risk”
~Andy Gill, The Independent
Neil Young & Crazy Horse pull “Red Sun” out of their repertoire of songs to wow a London crowd Monday night.
London’s The Independent writer Andy Gill writes in a concert review that: ‘Neil Young may be his own harshest critic. ‘At times tonight, frankly, we sucked,’ he says at the end of another marathon show with Crazy Horse, his on-off backing band for over four decades. ‘But with what we do, that’s always a possibility.'”
Sometimes, he aptly states, they go beyond the point of no return.
“On ‘Walk Like A Giant’, a song about counter-culture values that closes his last album Psychedelic Pill, the almost subterranean fuzz distortion Young wrings from his Les Paul is the musical equivalent of tectonic plates shifting.”
According to the Irish Times, the crowd of 18,000 attending the Dublin June 15 show with Neil Young and Crazy Horse left disappointed with a self-indulgent performance.
The sound was awful, many said.
It starts out: “What was that wafting through the air at the RDS Arena last night? It was the smell of disappointment, as 18,000 Neil Young fans came to the slow and painful realisation that the man in black on stage was there only to please himself and not the modest attendance at the 30,000 capacity venue.”
The writer, Kevin Courtney, and the crowd it seems, wanted more classics. Some commenters at the end of the article beg to differ.
Jason Mendelsohn and Eric Klinger at the Website Pop Matters discuss the Rust Never Sleeps album indepth.
They describe it as: ” Right down the middle mix of solo works and Crazy Horse jams, we get the sense of the two sides of Neil Young—cranky acoustic troubadour and cranky electric thud-rocker.”
The review goes on to state: “Clearly, there’s a lot to unpack with this most unusual project, from its in-concert setting to its songwriting to the way Neil Young attempts to find his place as an elder statesmen/boring dinosaur (depending on which side of the line you stood) in the late ‘70s.”
Interesting review with a diaglogue about the album between two music critics. Their views certianly differ. Mendelsohn writes: ” Yeah, “Pocahontas’ is straight up creepy. In fact, I’ve been skipping by most of the strummy bits lately. ‘Ride My Llama’ and ‘Pocahontas’ don’t do much for me. The same goes for ‘Thrasher’—there just isn’t anything there. It’s the rockery on side two that ends up grabbing me. Where those songs may be missing some of the melody that propelled After the Gold Rush and Harvest, they make up for it in some signature hooks. You know the song has a catchy hook when you start humming to yourself about welfare mothers making better lovers”
Farm Aid will return to New York for the first time since 2007 this September, when the annual benefit concert takes place at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY on September 21.
This year’s line-up will feature Farm Aid co-founders Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp as well as Farm Aid regulars Neil Young and Dave Matthews. More artists will be announced soon.
A FarmAid.org pre-sale for tickets begins on Tuesday, June 18, at noon EDT. The general onsale will take place Friday, June 28, at 10 a.m. EDT. Farm Aid is the longest running series of benefit concerts in America. Organizers have raised over $43 million to benefit family farmers. The first Farm Aid concert took place on September 22, 1985 in Champaign, IL. Last year’s concert was held at Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, PA.
Tom Hambleton provides BNB with setlists, thankfully. His website is the most comprehensive searchable archives on the Internets about anything Neil Young related setlists. Goto Sugar Mountain.
memphish on 
Albert Stromann on 
liza on 
Baz on 
