NEIL YOUNG Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Storytelling country rock titan Neil Young might have lived out his heyday penning songs that persist in cultural memory almost as stickily and earwormingly as pure folk tranmissions like "Happy Birthday", but that doesn't mean he's rested on his laurels; not one bit, in fact. True to this, Before And After comes as Young's whopping 45th studio album, sure to set new and old fans alight with glee at word of its special status as a "trip into (Young's) musical history", in the words of co-producer Lou Adler. Of course, this communicates nothing else except the fact that Young has braved both his nearly unending back-catalogue and his unheard vaults, lending choice selections from both each a fresh re-recording. The likes of 'I'm The Ocean', 'Homefires' and 'Burned' are each set aright, to the extent that Young insists that the listener experience the release in one big go, having been conceived as a single 48-minute piece, despite its divvying-up into track-length revisitations.