*zzzzzzzzz*snerk* Sorry, I was dozing: Neil Diamond, Home Before Dark

First confession: I am not a fan of acoustic guitars. When I was in college, it seemed like everyone had an acoustic, and they all thought they were folk singers. Some thought they were Bob Dylan, some thought they were Woody Guthrie, some thought they were Joni Mitchell, all of them were boring as a dentist’s waiting room being filled with sleeping gas. American acoustic folk is one of the music genres that provides me an express trip to Snoreville. Second confession: I have never listened to Neil Diamond before. The first I will remain steadfast on, but I apologize for the second, solely based on his fame.

I’m not expecting to make any friends with this review, so be prepared when I say this album is very effective as a sleep aid. I found very little interesting with Home Before Dark, and what caught my interest for even a moment was rapidly forgotten by subsequent tracks that make a good money working part-time jobs as substitutes for the Sandman.

The first song, “If I Don’t See You Again,” struck me as being a touching and potent piece that, while not exactly making me jump up and down in excitement, held me down enough to appreciate it in some sense. Unfortunately, this is almost immediately undone with the next track, “Pretty Amazing Grace.” I found “Pretty Amazing Grace” to be somewhat annoying and otherwise forgettable, starting out sounding like “Feliz Navidad.” I can sort of dig “Don’t Go There,” but at the moment, I can’t recall why. Skipping to track five, “One More Bite Of The Apple” wins the Official Rum-Soaked Review Silver Medal for Most Annoying Song of 2008 (Gold goes to R.E.M.’s “I’m Gonna DJ,” but it almost was unseated here). It only serves the purpose of waking me up after the last track. The chorus is cliché and badly delivered, and at 6 minutes runtime, too f#cking long. The whole album feels long, but I can't tell you because I can't pay attention to it long enough to accurately judge. “Forgotten” is a bit more what I was looking for: down-home country folk. “Slow It Down” grabs with the introduction before following it’s own title and dropping pace to something very comfortable (to the point of putting my head on a pillow). The title track isn’t bad, but still boring in ways I didn’t think were possible. The deluxe edition features two covers, “Without Her” by Harry Nilsson and “Make You Feel My Love” by Bob Dylan. “Without Her” is the dark, morose, painfully beautiful sort of thing that I automatically gravitate to, while “Make You Feel My Love” doesn’t change the prevalent drowsiness. That’s all I got; every other track is so bland that I didn’t realize they were over until two songs later.

Almost forgot to mention: the album has nice photography. It's a pretty slick looking case. The only criticism here is that it is annoying to slide the disc out of the cardboard sleeves glued to the outer flaps.

I’m given to understand that Neil Diamond is a very polarizing artist, with disputes between fans and non-fans running the risk of ruining relationships of all kinds. Find out if your spouse-to-be is a fan or not if you are strongly on either side of the fence; otherwise, you run the risk of many bitter arguments. Yes, Neil is famous as a great songwriter. But he’s not the be-all and end-all of contemporary music.

Final analysis is that Home Before Dark is emotional folk inspirational lovey-dovey crap that gets very old, very fast. To be fair, Home Before Dark isn’t a bad album by any stretch of the imagination. What it is is utterly boring. To some, generating a sense of complete indifference is a worse effect than being bad. For them, I can only say, “avoid this album.” However, if acoustic, calm, but occasionally potent is your speed, then perhaps this album is for you, assuming you aren’t a rabid Diamond fan already and haven’t bought it already. As for me, I beg your pardon but, yawn I’m feeling kind of drowsy right now. I’ll get back to you after a nap.



Neil Diamond website and myspace