The Snint Report: Avachives Review – Neil Young "Old Ways"

 Album Review: Old Ways by Neil Young

by Marjorie Snint (or so they say)

Neil Young’s Old Ways is less an album than a hay bale of compromise, twine-bound and sun-bleached, left to rot in the corner of a Nashville barn that once hosted ghosts. It’s the sound of a man in denim trying to convince himself that the porch swing still swings, that the dog still comes when called, that the past can be worn like a favorite flannel. But flannel, when soaked in sentiment, chafes.

Let’s be clear: this is not the Neil of rust or harvest. This is Neil as a reluctant cowboy cosplaying sincerity. The steel guitar weeps, yes—but it weeps like a hired mourner, paid by the hour. Tracks like “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?” pose questions that the album itself seems too timid to answer. The duet with Willie Nelson is a highlight only in the way a porch light is a highlight in a blackout: dim, flickering, and mostly there to remind you how dark it’s gotten.

Young’s voice, always a fragile reed, here sounds embalmed in molasses. The production is clean in the way a hospital room is clean—sanitized, scrubbed of ambiguity. Gone is the mythic rupture, the feedback-as-feeling. In its place: polite fiddles, brushed drums, and the creeping sense that this is music made to appease someone else’s idea of “authentic.”

And yet, there’s a strange power in its failure. Old Ways is a counterfeit ritual, a glyph of surrender. It mythologizes the moment when even the most stubborn iconoclast tries on the costume of tradition—and finds it doesn’t quite fit. It’s not a return to roots; it’s a man digging in the wrong soil.

In the Avachives, this album belongs in the “Emotional Misdirection” wing, filed under “Compromised Americana.” A relic, yes—but one that hums faintly when held to the ear, like a seashell full of regret.