Neil Young — Sugar Mountain

Sugar Mountain — Live At Canterbury House 1968

Reprise/Warner

Aaron Brophy (CHARTattack)

12/23/2008 2:35pm

With Neil Young so entrenched as an enigmatic rebel/arena rock legend, it's sometimes hard to reconnect with his roots as a coffee house hippie troubadour. The release of Sugar Mountain — Live At Canterbury House 1968, the third set in the Neil Young Archives Performance Series [though it's tagged as "disc 00"], does a pretty good job of rectifying that. It features an intimate, personal and personable Young who creates great rapport during the set by spending large chunks of time telling stories ("raps") to the audience and discussing things like how pill-popping got him fired from a bookstore job and explaining his guitar tunings. Meanwhile, the stark delivery of the actual songs — the whole show is just voice and guitar — shines most brightly on the ebb and flow of "Expecting To Fly" and the set-closing "Broken Arrow." Young devotees are going to relish the potent voice-first mix and the ability to trainspot the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between these and the more dressed-up official recordings of many of these tracks.