Neil Young's ninth solo album, Zuma, is by far the best album he's made; it's the most cohesive (but not the most obvious) concept album I've ever encountered; and despite its depths, Zuma is so listenable that it should become Young's first hit album since Harvest….

If Tonight's The Night was bleakly, spookily black, Zuma—Young's "morning" album—is hardly suffused with sunlight and flowers. Apparently, tempered gloom is the brightest this love- and death-haunted epileptic genius can manage these days. But if, as a stubbornly solitary Young proclaims in "Drive Back," he wants to "wake up with no one around," in "Lookin' for a Love" he's still holding on to some hope of finding that magical life- and self-affirming lover who can make him "live and make the best of what I see." Young doesn't shrink from the paradox, he embraces it like the lover he imagines….

Young is struggling to get a grip on himself, to "burn off the fog" and see what went wrong with his loves and his dreams. Out of these agonized, bitter and painfully frank confessions he manages to reach both a new, honest lovingness and—even more importantly—the revelation … that neither his wings nor his woman can carry him away. For Young this insight holds both terror and liberation.

For this struggle, Young wheels out all his familiar heavy artillery: prominent are his recurring metaphors of birds in flight and boats on the water, his compulsive truthfulness, his eccentrically brilliant (and seemingly intuitive) narrative style, his effortlessly lovely melodies and his cat-in-heat singing….

As he attacks, Young manages to work in oddly playful references to other songs … cryptic comments …, dramatically forceful incongruities …, novel structural devices …, and brilliantly, uniquely ironic expressions….

"Cortez the Killer" is an extended narrative tale that packs equal wallop as a classic retelling of an American legend, a Lawrencian erotic dreamscape and Young's ultimate personal metaphor. This song, perhaps Young's crowning achievement, builds with gathering intensity….

             He came dancing across the water
             With his galleons and guns
             Looking for the new world
             And that palace in the sun.
 
             On the shore lay Montezuma
             With his coca leaves and pearls
             In his halls he often wandered
             With the secrets of the worlds.

The secret of the album, indeed of Young's work in its entirety, is encapsulated in this confrontation: force and wisdom, innocence and aggression, love and death are the issues and the stakes. And the climax is inevitable….