The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young

He might have been bestowed the honor of being the Godfather of Grunge in the ‘90s, but it didn’t take a tour with Pearl Jam for people to connect the dots between Neil Young’s noise-conversant country-rock auteurism and its lingering, sprawling effects on the alt-rock underground. Assembled in part to raise funds for The Bridge School, a non-profit launched after Neil’s wife Pegi found difficulty in finding a place that could educate their non-verbal son Ben, The Bridge followed on the heels of a series of benefit concerts headlined by the likes of Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. And while the roster here diverges pretty far from that classic rock household-name status, it’s still a strong assemblage of some of indie rock’s most now-revered next-gen heirs. The best part is that there’s still some surprising transformations at work. You may think you can picture what a Flaming Lips cover of “After the Gold Rush” might sound like, and you’d probably be wrong; Wayne Coyne’s found his now-familiar voice at this point, but the moments where that high, occasionally raspy quaver meets Young on the original’s minimally-backed terms are subverted by a noisy drum-hammering full-band outbursts, omitting the first verse but still looking at mother nature doing sweat-flinging windsprints towards the 1990s. Psychic TV beat Saint Etienne to the punch by a year on their cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and while it’s nowhere near as winsomely upbeat, it finds a different angle in maintaining the original’s lonesome country waltz as a hypnotic fugue state riddled with quivering guitar distortion and a sorrowful violin. Sonic Youth do their part to rescue Trans from critical ignominy with a raucous (if synthless) take on “Computer Age” which sounds like the ‘79 Crazy Horse squall that technophobes probably wish the original could’ve been — or at least like if Neil’s kosmische ear turned towards ‘75 NEU! instead of ‘78 Kraftwerk. And since Neil’s catalogue has benefited from both reverence and deconstruction, it seems fitting to get both a starkly heartfelt Nick Cave excursion through “Helpless” and a bloodily smeared culture-jamming drone-gone-punk corrosion of “Mr. Soul” by Bongwater, while Pixies (“Winterlong”) and Dinosaur Jr. (“Lotta Love”) lean into how compatible Young’s songwriting is with college-rock jangle and unfettered noise respectively.