Neil Young: Sleeps with Angels is just as raw three decades on

Sleeps with Angels, released four months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, was Young’s uneasy lament to the grunge singer’s passing. Young’s line “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” was scrawled in Cobain’s suicide note. This week Young’s music returns to streamers, and it’s fitting to revisit this oft-overlooked outlier. It’s a blackened slice of doom that still feels perennially vital. Driveby and Safeway Cart are languid conjurings lifted by Young’s flute and dreamlike verse. The cantankerous, penultimate track, Piece of Crap, feels like an early portent of the fist-waving refusenik Young would become. It’s a bewitching album that stumbles half-sleeping, half-waking through bad dreams and dark worlds. Few have done it better since.