Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Year Of The Horse

Now here's a good way to spend your record-buying dollar: Neil Young's umpteenth live album compiles 12 lengthy, jamming, overblown songs into a sprawling, two-disc, 85-minute collection. Set aside the fact that this isn't even Young's first multi-disc live set of the '90s—as well as the fact that most of the material here is far from his most essential work—and you're left with a decent batch of drawn-out live recordings that all but the most devout Crazy Horse devotees will want to avoid. Year Of The Horse also carries on a frustrating recent trend in music: the two-CD set that, had it been edited properly, would easily fit on one low-priced disc. Many of these songs are good (albeit unspectacular) selections, but if you're a fan, you've heard them all before, and in incarnations that aren't muddied by various arenas' sound systems.