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NEIL YOUNG, SILVER & GOLD (REPRISE): It seems weird to call Silver & Gold a masterpiece. I mean, how many masterpieces can you have in one career? Neil Young, for more than three decades one of our most influential and consistent songwriters, has blessed us already with Harvest and its sequel, Harvest Moon.

By Times staff

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 12, 2000

NEIL YOUNG, SILVER & GOLD (REPRISE): It seems weird to call Silver & Gold a masterpiece. I mean, how many masterpieces can you have in one career? Neil Young, for more than three decades one of our most influential and consistent songwriters, has blessed us already with Harvest and its sequel, Harvest Moon.

Also, After the Gold Rush.

Don't forget Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

Add Silver & Gold to the list, for you'd have to be a fool to suggest that this beautiful collection of simple folk tunes isn't musical bliss. Celebrating normal things like coming home, nostalgia, family, Silver & Gold doesn't rock at all and it's not supposed to.

Young's signature vocals -- that piercing, heartbreaking whine -- get better with age (hey, a "fine whine"?). He's joined by the equally magnificent Emmylou Harris on several tracks.

This is an artist who knows no boundaries. And, lucky for us, Young's the restless type. He pretty much invented California folk rock in the 1960s with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Buffalo Springfield. He has done country rock, distorted grunge -- they don't call Young the Godfather of Grunge just because he wore flannel shirts. Our boy even tinkered with synths -- gasp! -- in the New Wave 1980s.

That's why it's especially endearing to witness Young coming home again to gentle, melodic, sometimes brooding folk music. Silver & Gold is honest and guileless, and sweet: sweet to the point where tough guys may shrug it off as sappy.

But Young is a tough guy himself. Only difference is, he sings the words we all would if we weren't so scared. Young has never been afraid to let vulnerability show. That makes him the toughest guy of all.

GRADE A+

-- GINA VIVINETO, Times pop music critic

CRACKER, GARAGE D'OR (VIRGIN): If modern guitar rock is an endangered species, Cracker is doing its best to send the genre off in a blaze of glory.

Even the best Cracker studio albums are marred by the band's weakness for the occasional novelty song, inside joke or other self-indulgence, but this compilation loads up on the crunching, sinister alt-anthems Cracker does better than anybody else. They come rolling out one after another, without a breather, like the Cleveland Indians' starting lineup: Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now), I See the Light, Low ("Hey, don't you want to go down, like some disgraced cosmonaut?"), Get Off This and on and on.

After pinning listeners against the back wall for almost an hour, the collection finally calms down long enough to provide a taste of David Lowery's introspective side. Lowery probably is the most interesting split personality in rock since Ray Davies, in whose brain You Really Got Me and Village Green Preservation Society found room to coexist. As for Lowery, whether his id or superego is doing the talking, he taps into the Zeitgeist of a whole generation of spoiled, sensitive American slackers. Songs such as Big Dipper and Euro-Trash Girl could be travelogs for every aging college kid trying to postpone real life.

If you finally get tired of Lowery's hilarious kvetching, just sit back and pay attention to Johnny Hickman, the most self-effacing top-notch guitarist this side of Mike Campbell. Or appreciate the band's ear for mimicry and mock-tribute. Big Dipper sounds like Davies. The cover of the Flamin' Groovies' Shake Some Action sounds the way the Stones would if Mick and Keith were still alive. And Sweet Thistle Pie sounds like what would happen if the members of AC/DC woke up one day with an extra 150 collective IQ points.

Lucky purchasers of the limited edition bonus disc will enjoy a more eclectic sample that sprawls everywhere from alt-country to surf music to creepy Carpenters covers. But disc one is the main course. If guitar rock is dying, this is the perfect way to go.

GRADE: A.

-- ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Times staff writer

FIRE AND SKILL: THE SONGS OF THE JAM (Epic/Ignition): Twenty years ago, at the cusp of punk's flameout and the ascendance of New Wave, no band in England was more popular than the Jam. But if you're struggling to remember them, you're hardly alone on this side of the Atlantic. Genuine superstars in the U.K., the band never attained more than a cult following in the States. Then, at the height of its success, Jam founder/guitarist/singer/songwriter Paul Weller pulled the plug on the group.

So one might think that Fire and Skill: The Songs of the Jam would be a welcome tribute for Jam fans, and a worthwhile introduction for the uninitiated.

Think again.

It has become the rule rather than the exception with tribute albums; what tantalizes on the drawing board fizzles when it's released. Artists incapable of doing justice to a band's legacy are foisted off as relevant. Pairings of artists to songs and the interpretations themselves are seemingly done for laughs.

Here, the few successful cuts are burdened with too many others that are uninspired, rote or worse. Certainly, little on Fire & Skill illuminates the power and urgency of the Jam's originals.

There's plenty of blame to go around. Reef bludgeons its way through That's Entertainment, robbing the song of any of its original poignancy. The Beastie Boys decelerate Start and its Taxman-derived riff into a somnambulant lounge tune. Ben Harper, Heavy Stereo and Silversun sound stiff and perfunctory. So do Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who each contribute a cut. Weller himself contributes No One In The World, an uninteresting new ballad that is Fire and Skill's last, uncredited track.

In spite of all the missteps, a few cuts actually work. Everything But the Girl's Tracy Thorn is an apt choice for the melancholy English Rose, and Garbage's Shirley Manson captures the kiss-off tone of Butterfly Collector perfectly with her monotonic, deadpan delivery. Gene and Buffalo Tom each contribute covers (Town Called Malice and Going Underground, respectively) that hold their own when compared to the originals.

But it's not enough. Like so many bands before them who've gotten the "tribute" treatment, the Jam's legacy deserved better than this. Fire and Skill sheds little light on why the Jam mattered. For that, Jam fans and neophytes alike should head to the band's back catalog, for any of a number of solid compilations, or for the classic studio albums Sound Affects, All Mod Cons and Setting Sons.

Grade C -

-- JOHN MARTIN Times staff writer