Neil Young Oceanside Countryside

Oceanside Countryside is among a handful of late-’70s Neil Young albums—including Hitchhiker, Chrome Dreams and Homegrown—that went unreleased in their time, only to be resurrected from the vaults more than 40 years later. This is Americana Neil: more grounded than the idealism of After the Gold Rush but softer and sweeter than the bitterness of Tonight’s the Night. In short, his mid-thirties. The songs here all turned up elsewhere in different mixes and forms (“Pocahontas”, “Human Highway”, “Lost in Space”), but it’s still great to hear them as intended. And while casual listeners might consider his late-life effort to release seemingly every last thing on his shelves to the public exhausting or self-involved, correcting the mistakes of the record companies who rejected these albums in the first place is as perfectly Neil Young as it gets. So cranky, but so beautiful. Did anyone do it better?