Oceanside Countryside is another intriguing dive into the Neil Young archives

Mere months after the extensive (and expensive) 17-CD Archives Volume 3 box set, which itself popped out soon after Early Daze, an enticing LP of earliest recordings with Young’s most prominent musical companions, Crazy Horse, here’s Oceanside Countryside, an LP release for a long-rumoured ‘lost’ album from 1977.

Oceanside Countryside isn’t quite a previously unheard lost classic ala Homegrown, a shelved album from 1974 that Young dusted off to well-deserved acclaim in 2020. There are no previously unheard songs in the style of Homegrown here: all of Oceanside Countryside has found a home on earlier albums, either in these exact versions or with revised arrangements, and if you discount the baffling decision to swap Nicolette Larson’s backing vocals for Young’s own charmingly shaky harmonies on two songs, these specific performances are all included on Archives Volume 3, which included a slightly different version of this album.

Welcome to the logic of Neil Young’s archival release series, which not infrequently gives the impression of Young deciding what to put out next by chucking darts at a board decorated with titles of potential releases. Less affluent or more impatient Young enthusiasts might – with some justification – look at the recycling of nothing but previously released material on Oceanside Countryside (and its fellow ‘lost’ mid-70s album Chrome Dreams, released on LP in 2023) as seriously frustrating when such long-promised archival releases as a live album from Young’s 1995 tour with Pearl Jam and 2012 Crazy Horse live album Alchemy remain in the vault.

You certainly can’t argue with the quality of the music. Ultimately shelved in favour of the more unified and honed 1978 album Comes A Time, which provided Young with a commercial comeback after the string of superb but defiantly unpolished and downcast records that followed 1972’s smash hit Harvest, Oceanside Countryside provides a snapshot of Young in the middle of his 1970s winning streak, possibly the most creatively fertile run that any songwriter has ever had the good fortune to find themselves in. Recorded in Florida and Malibu, the A side (‘Oceanside’) showcases Young as a solitary troubadour, excelling in both unfathomably lovely, melancholy travelogues (“Goin’ Back”, “Sail Away”) and eccentric one-offs (deeply odd but wonderful “Lost In Space”). Recorded in Nashville, the B side leans towards the countrified glow of Comes A Time, while also allowing for the rambling mystery of “The Old Homestead”, which beats even Young’s own standards for spontaneity by appearing to be arranged while it’s being performed.

There’s plenty of scope for rediscovery in this kind of reshuffling of theoretically familiar songs: not so much a deep cut as a buried treasure, the naval tragedy of “Captain Kennedy” (first officially released on 1980’s Hawks and Doves) positively stuns in this sequence. For most songwriters, a song this potent, hauntingly performed, would be an all-time classic. For Young, it’s one of many that were originally shelved in favour of even stronger material, or simply because it didn’t match the mood of the moment.