
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 8, 1995                   TAG: 9507110015
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RICHARD HARRINGTON THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NEIL YOUNG'S `MIRROR BALL': GRUNGE ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

``Mirror Ball'' proves that Neil Young hasn't burned out and that he certainly won't fade away as long as he continues to inspire and work with bands like Pearl Jam. The Seattle supergroup is not promoted on the cover of ``Mirror Ball'' (Reprise), and if you didn't know it was them, you wouldn't know it was them: Eddie Vedder limits his vocals to two short verses on ``Peace and Love,'' and Pearl Jam sounds like a tight, rehearsed (dare we say disciplined?) Crazy Horse. The album was produced by Pearl Jam's producer, Brendan O'Brien.

There is an obvious empathy between the two, one that extends beyond independent thinking and a commitment to noisy rustic rock with rough edges preferably intact. Both Young and Pearl Jam have been outspoken about traditional music-business structures (or strictures): Young's anti-sponsorship anthem ``This Note's for You'' certainly fits nicely with Pearl Jam's lost war with Ticketmaster, just as Young's raw guitar fits with the grunge insistence of Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard and Mike McCready.

Young was once sued by a label for recording ``unrepresentative music,'' but ``Mirror Ball'' is as representative as you'd want: chunky power chords, edgy guitar feedback, impassioned vocals, familiar themes and images. Recorded over four days, the album has a loose, spontaneous energy, as well as a sense of renewal. ``People my age/ They don't do the things I do/ They go somewhere while I run away with you,'' Young sings on ``I'm the Ocean,'' his vocals pushed by a thick, muddy guitar.

The song could be about either of the crucibles in Young's life: music and family. ``I got my friends and I got my children, too,'' he sings, and you have to think Pearl Jam is included among the latter.

The album kicks off with ``Song X,'' its ``hey ho away we go'' sea-chantey energy contrasting youthful innocence with the bracing reality of anti-abortion murders (``The priest was there with sandy hair/ Religion by his side/ He saw his law was broken/ The punishment was applied''). Abortion is also addressed in ``Act of Love,'' which Young performed with a mix of Crazy Horses and Pearl Jammers at his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and last winter's Voters for Choice concerts at Constitution Hall. With dense, crunched chords sounding like slowed-down Stones or ``Zuma''-era Young, this version (with Pearl Jam alone) is tauter, more disciplined, the focus less on the mood of the song than on its mixed messages of responsibility and interference.

After the short but haunting pump-organ soliloquy ``What Happened Yesterday,'' Young slips into his collaboration with Vedder, ``Peace and Love,'' looking at those '60s ideals with equal parts cynicism and affirmation. As he did with ``Harvest Moon,'' and on much of his work since the fallow experimentalism of the mid-'80s, Young is looking at the past to take from it those things that have genuine, lasting value.

``Throw Your Hatred Down'' is quintessential Young - catchy, propulsive, committed. ``Downtown'' is both wry history and warm homage to an old haunt (the Fillmore Auditorium); it also reflects undiminished musical enthusiasm (``There's a note ... like a water-washed diamond in a river of sin''). Earlier on ``I'm the Ocean,'' Young admits, ``I'm a Cutlass Supreme in the wrong lane/ Trying to turn against the flow.''

It's what keeps him forever Young.

by CNB