The On the Beach album model kit is available but it is not known how much it costs or how to buy it online yet.
Neil Young, 'On the Beach' (July 19, 1974)
Regarding the album, on the heels of the success of 1972’s Harvest album, Neil Young found himself in a darker place, grappling with his increased profile and popularity. With On the Beach, the second album in what would become known as his “Ditch Trilogy,”
On The Beach is perfect for those late nights alone, where the further you venture into the album, the more poignant the evening feels. Both mellow and despondent, the record features the purest of songwriting from a genuine artist, flowing gracefully from start to finish.
Young attempting to move past his sorrow, and instead look forward with hope of wiping away the thoughts of despair. It’s a great record, and it does a fine job of reminding you that you’re human.
There are few musical artists who need the old canonization speech less than Neil Young. With his reputation preserved amongst us youngsters as the Godfather of Grunge (apparently based on little more than a predilection towards flannel), he's already known by all as the hip great-uncle amidst the Woodstock era's senile grandparents. Still, attention must be paid to the most impressive feat of Young's career: an all-but-perfect streak of very good-to-excellent albums that spanned an incredible, and unparalleled, eleven years.
Which makes it especially cruel that, for years afterward, Neil's eccentric skepticism about the auditory worth of the compact disc format kept many of those albums out-of-print. So it's somewhat ironic that now, in the dying days of the digital disc, Reprise Records has finally convinced their stubborn client to allow for patching up most of these holes, rescuing four albums from obscurity and bootleggers. Fancy remastering, fancy packaging: who cares? I can finally retire four crackly vinyls to wall-decoration duty.
Rolling Stone magazine lauded it upon its release (and has since ranked it the 311th greatest album of all time). Jack Garner of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, in his 8/16/74 review, called it “a strong, complete and exciting record.” Across the pond, in the Bracknell and Ascot Times, Geoff Thompson agreed, though he thought it had a listening curve: “On the Beach is an album that takes quite a bit of getting into, but once you are in, there’s no escaping.” A few decades later, in a capsule review that I posted to the original Old Grey Cat website in the late 1990s, I called it “a grim realization (or is that acceptance) of life, circa 1974.”
