NEIL YOUNG Archives Volume II: 1972–1976 REPRISE

“I love you so much I can hardly stand it/But everybody is alone”

IT begins quietly in A&M Studios, Los Angeles, on November 15, 1972, and ends several thousand miles away on March 10, 1976 in a blaze of feedback at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall. The intervening years – those covered, no less, by this ambitious second instalment of the expansive Archives project – remains a critical period for Neil Young, not just for the stellar run of albums he made during this time, but for the way it continues to dominate our thinking about his long, capricious career.

After The Gold Rush and Harvest made Young a solo star at the start of the ’70s, but his legend took shape during the turbulent, hugely productive phase that followed. It is a transportive and gripping narrative – the “Ditch” trilogy, the “lost” albums, the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and the arrival of his replacement Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, his break-up with Carrie Snodgress – and one which still exerts a gravitational pull from which it is difficult to escape.

So what does the arrival – at long last – of Archives Volume II tell us about 1972 to 1976? Does this new boxset – 10 discs, a handsome trove of music, all for a correspondingly handsome sum of £210, with all 3,000 copies already sold out – deepen our knowledge of Young’s fertile mid-’70s period? Or instead do these 131 tracks take us so far behind the curtain that the power of the original music gets lost along the way?

begins with the artist pared back to his essential elements: voice and guitar. Here he is in A&M Studios in 1972, with producer Henry Lewy on the other side of the glass. There are three songs from their session– in this early acoustic iteration, it’s much less manic and ironic, landing on a genuinely anthemic vibe. “The Bridge”, one of Young’s most affecting piano ballads, is exquisitely rendered. In between takes, he banters with Lewy. “I can hear those people so loud that it’s weird,” says Young before “Monday Morning”, presumably referring to noise from a neighbouring studio.