Neil Young's ninth solo album, Zuma, is by far the best album he's made; it's the most cohesive (but not the most obvious) concept album I've ever encountered; and despite its depths, Zuma is so listenable that it should become Young's first hit album since Harvest….

If Tonight's The Night was bleakly, spookily black, Zuma—Young's "morning" album—is hardly suffused with sunlight and flowers. Apparently, tempered gloom is the brightest this love- and death-haunted epileptic genius can manage these days. But if, as a stubbornly solitary Young proclaims in "Drive Back," he wants to "wake up with no one around," in "Lookin' for a Love" he's still holding on to some hope of finding that magical life- and self-affirming lover who can make him "live and make the best of what I see." Young doesn't shrink from the paradox, he embraces it like the lover he imagines...