Israel Nash
Album: Israel Nash's Silver Season
Label: Loose
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.israelnash.com

The release of 2013's 'Rain Plains' saw the Missouri-born singer-songwriter both drop the Gripka surname and come out of the Neil Young closet with a vengeance. His previous albums having paraded Ryan Adams, Gram Parsons and John Fogarty as his core influences, that third full-length release, could have easily persuaded Young that it was something he'd forgotten he'd recorded.

That's even more the case this time round. Expanding from Harvest into the more acid-soaked psychedelic era of On The Beach and Rust Never Sleeps, full of washes of distorted guitars and feedback, Nash's nasal falsetto a dead ringer for Young, it's a heady, lysergic and psychedelic affair with huge, expansive soundscapes, most around the five minutes or more mark, with his four piece backing band featuring Midlake guitarist Joey McClellan.

Written for his daughter, a musician's song about leaving home for the road, 'Willow' opens on pipe organ before pedal steel kicks in for a keening, wistful number and, following a quiet one minute intro, 'Parlour Song', written in response to the Sandy Hook school shootings in 2012 ("Sooner or later we'll surrender our guns.But not until we've shot everyone"), initially harks back to the sound of Buffalo Springfield's 'Expecting To Fly' before building to a swirly coda of pedal effects, , Nash intoning a line about "the power of the people". 'The Fire & The Flood' adopts a similar approach, a drifting, dreamy melody with Nash's echoey voice held back in the mix behind understated reverb guitar to conjure a sprawling desert atmosphere before things.

A blissed out haze, soaked in pedal steel, also envelops 'LA Lately', a narcotic hymn to the city of angels, followed by 'Lavendula', another drift of a song written at home during the winter and capturing that sense of life in stasis, the emergence of the guitars towards the end hinting at new life awakening.

The longest track, at just over six and a half minutes, although it starts out in simple acoustic mood, the vocals and guitars floating across the sonic skies, it emulates Young's characteristic of erupting into huge freak out guitars and effects. Then, as if exhausted, the spiritually-themed 'A Coat of Many Colors' drops back into folksy acoustic territory, echoing 'My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)' with Nash's enervated voice and guitar taking centre stage behind a steady drum beat, occasionally lifted by electric swells, Another song about touring, 'Mariner's Ode' is perhaps the most musically immediate track and the closest to the 'Harvest' mood before the album ends with 'The Rag & Bone Man', shimmering keys and pedal steel introducing a cosmic hymn to hope and finding overlooked beauty in the world that closes with an anthemic chorus of We Shall Overcome. Sure, Nash often sounds like a Neil Young clone, but listen closely and you'll hear he has a silver lining all of his own.

Mike Davies