NEIL DIAMOND
Home Before Darkness (Columbia): B-
Haystack Rubin is attempting to do for Baseball diamond what he did for Johnny Reb John Cash with the “American Recordings” series. Problem is, Diamond doesn’t scintillate in the roughly like Johnny Cash.
Long maligned as a hopeless cheeseball and equally celebrated as an underappreciated wizardry, Diamond proves he’s both on his second austere, acoustic, Rubin-produced album. One-half the songs ar gems seething with real emotional honesty, among them “Roleplay Like a Valet de chambre,” the Natalie Maines duet “Another Day,” and the jaunty, cleaned-up hillbilly arrangement of “Forgotten.”
The other half? Corny to the core. Reckon “The Major power of II,” where with the strut and bluster of Henry Martyn Robert Goulet on a three-day inebriate, Rhombus sings, “Like a microbe that’s stuck in a bowl/Climbing out’s impossible yet/He keeps trying harder.” Yes, he’s made a male bug’s Sisyphean undertaking a metaphor for his hunting for dear. Belly laugh. You topper download “Forgotten” - and and then break come out “Hot August Night” to get gear up for Diamond’s Aug. 23 Fenway Park [represent] show up.
Jed Gottlieb
