Neil Young and Crazy Horse at Barclays Center What's wrong with clichés? Neil Young asks in his new memoir, "Waging Heavy Peace." He's still bothered by what he describes as his first review, in or around 1965, which accused him of using them in his early songs. May I answer? Clichés lead you away from your own truth. You want to save time and look smart, so you put someone else's frame on your thought. It's not even a someone; it's a blind committee of millions. Occasionally the frame looks nice enough, and you use it. We all do. But for that moment you're briefly and completely deluded. If a cliché looks or sounds bad on you, you're the last to know. Nobody should go near one, especially not an artist. I'm sure Neil Young knows this. But maybe he doesn't perceive clichés at all, like a kind of color blindness. For the last few months, for the first time in eight years, he's been touring with Crazy Horse, his 43-year-old band, on the occasion of a new record, "Psychedelic Pill" (Reprise). Crazy Horse was a brave project at the beginning; it still seemed so on Monday night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Not brave in the usual 20th-century-art sense, as in confronting audiences with the unfamiliar, but brave as in consistently going simple and deep, almost embarrassingly so, at the cost of concision or wit. Crazy Horse's music is prerational, precompromise, full of love and anger, both very small and very large: a messy roadhouse band with upper-atmosphere ambitions. It does not try to save time or look smart. But Mr. Young's guitar solos on Monday gave its songs an almost classical narrative. For long stretches, as he gathered with the rhythm guitarist Frank Sampedro and the bassist Billy Talbot in front of Ralph Molina's drum riser, he produced a series of choruses or chapters, which grew and subsided on schedule. Some improvisations were melodic and symmetric, or built on the vocal melodies of the songs - "Love and Only Love," "Powderfinger," "Cinnamon Girl," the new "Ramada Inn" and "Born in Ontario" - and some were brute attacks of noise and repetition. But they all ran along the lumpy grid of the four-beat rhythms and steady medium tempos. A few quieter songs, functional palate-cleansers played by Mr. Young on acoustic guitar or piano, filled the middle: "The Needle and the Damage Done," as well as the new "Twisted Road," referring to Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, and the unreleased "Singer Without a Song." At two hours, with normalized arena volume and acoustics, the concert wasn't long or loud enough. Everest and Patti Smith both performed first. Its set list exactly matched most of the other concerts of the tour's last few weeks; some parts felt rote compared with what this band has achieved onstage in the past. But the concert had periods of magic crankiness, particularly "Walk Like a Giant," a brooding, minor-key, 15-minute-plus woolly mammoth that begins with a short whistled melody, like a Bruno Mars single. The message of its lyrics seems to be the spiritual failure of Mr. Young's generation to "save the world." Oh, it's grandiose. But he's not letting himself off the hook. "I used to walk like a giant on the land," he sang. Now I feel like a leaf floating in a stream. He tells it without recourse to clichés, or specificity: "We were pulling in the spiritual, riding on the desert wind." But then: "we skipped the rails and we started to fail and we folded up/and it's not enough." As with that old review, he's still bothered. I wanna walk like a giant on the land! He's trying to hold on to what he can see and believe in, what he knows and loves; he won't accept his own mistakes. And the best of Mr. Young's guitar playing on Monday was similarly unaccepting: stubborn, bitter, mysterious, like smoke still rising off ancient damages. During"Walk Like a Giant," he attacked his red metal stompbox, compulsively altering guitar tones and conjuring his greatest sound: distortion as deep and dark and dense as a weather emergency, obscuring the frequencies of the individual notes. At the end, a stagehand positioned paper garbage in front of a huge fan, blowing it at the band members as they moved their guitars around, creating clouds of feedback noise over a series of measured drum thumps. This went on for more than five minutes, an event in itself. It was messy, and physical, and good.