Sleeps With Angels

Neil’s mid-’90s masterpiece contains the darkest, most wounded music he’d released since 1975’s death-stained Tonight’s the Night, with his trusty backing band Crazy Horse providing queasy texture instead of their usual grungy roar. The ominous, rumbling title track is haunted—musically and spiritually—by Kurt Cobain's ghost, but Young also turns his bleak perspective to America at large: “Driveby” is an aching acoustic rendering of gang violence, while “Safeway Cart” is an eerily desolate portrait of homelessness framed by a haunting, hypnotic bassline.