Fork in the Road is Neil Young’s highly publicized concept album about his home-brew conversion of an old beater of a car into the LincVolt, his very own electric car. As is his wont, Young delivers his message in the most blunt manner possible: If I can build a damn electric car, those crumb-bums in the automotive sector should be able to crap one out! And by the way, those guys on Wall Street are dicks too!

It’s not a subtle message, but it’s not a bad one. Unfortunately, much like 2006’s hurried collection of half-baked rails against the Bush administration, the message has been shoehorned into whatever throwaway blues-rock Young squeezed out on the fly. It’s nothing terrible, but it doesn’t come close to the complicated interplay between melody and meaning that defined classics like Harvest or recent achievements like Prairie Wind. Even on an album like Trans — Young’s oft-panned foray into vocoder-heavy electro rock — the saving grace is a near-perfect intertwining of musical and lyrical themes.

Consequently, Fork in the Road is a disappointing collection of late-period filler and weird experiments that loyal fans know all too well. His screed against Wall Street, for example, isn’t a terrible song, but the ad-nauseum spoken-word delivery of “Cough up the bucks, cough up the bucks” becomes so insipid that few listeners will be willing to stick around long enough to hear the half-decent guitar work or the album’s best backup vocal arrangement.