On the basis of the vast inferiority relative to his altogether spectacular Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere of the two albums he's made since teaming up with Crosby, Etc. (and thus insuring that he'd never again want for an audience), it can only be concluded that Neil Young is not one of those folks whom superstardom becomes artistically.

Harvest … finds Neil Young invoking most of the L.A. variety of superstardom's weariest cliches in an attempt to obscure his inability to do a good imitation of his earlier self….

[On Harvest] Neil's lyrics dominate the listener's attention far more than befit them. Neil's verbal resources have always been limited, but before now he's nearly always managed to come up with enough strong, evocative lines both to keep the listener's attention away from the banality of those by which they're surrounded and to supply the listener with a vivid enough impression of what a song is about to prevent his becoming frustrated by its seemingly deliberate obscurity and skeletal incompleteness….

Here, with the music making little impression, the words stand or fall on their own, ultimately falling as a result of their extremely low incidence of inspiration and high incidence of rhyme-scheme-forced silliness. A couple are even slightly offensive—"The Needle And The Damage Done," is glib, even cute, and displays little real commitment to its subject, while "There's A World" is simply flatulent and portentuous nonsense. Only "A Man Needs A Maid," in which Neil treats his favorite theme—his inability to find and keep a lover—in a novel and arrestingly brazen … manner, is particularly interesting—nearly everything else being limitlessly ponderable, but in a scant, oblique way that offers few rewards to the ponderer….

"Alabama" aspires to the identical effect of "Southern Man" but contains nothing nearly so powerful as that Gold Rush song's "I heard screamin' and bullwhips crackin'."… "Old Man's" first line promises a lot more than the song ever delivers in terms of compassionate perception. "Heart of Gold's" basic conceit would be laughed off the airwaves coming from another solo troubadour. "Are You Ready For The Country," like "Cripple Creek Ferry," seems an in-joke throwaway intended for the amusement of certain of Neil's superstar pals. The title tune is lyrically cluttered and oblique, and "Out on The Weekend" is puerile, precious, and self-indulgent, not to mention musically insipid….

[He's] seemingly lost sight of what once made his music uniquely compelling and evocative and become just another pretty-singing solo superstar.