Rust Never Sleeps

As far as pure song-craft goes, it hard to beat this 1979 offering from Neil Young & Crazy Horse. By the end of the '90s, Young, Talbot, Molina and Sampredo had refined their crushing sonic assault to the extent that they could bludgeon the listener with wagnerian riffs and rhythms (the entropy hymn "Hey Hey, My My") or provide just enough grit to keep young's far-out lyrics from ascending into the stratosphere ("Ride my Llama").

Song-wise, Rust is a schizophrenic album. Young moves from the brilliant surrealist imagery of "Pocahontas", with it's evocation of "Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me", to the sharp narrative perspective of the equally transcendent "Powderfinger" and the good-humoured social commentary of "Welfare Mothers".