Artist: Neil Young and Crazy Horse
Album: “Americana”
Label: Reprise

String together songs such as “Cortez the Killer,” “Pocahontas,” “Like an Inca,” “Powderfinger,” “Goin’ Home” and others from throughout Neil Young’s career, and you get a Howard Zinn-like alternative history of New World conquest, an accounting of what has been lost by indigenous people and the environment to violence and greed.

With “Americana,” Young funnels that worldview through a series of folk standards, some so ancient and familiar that they are now thought of as quaint, children’s songs, ingrained in the heads of the nation’s kindergartners. But these songs tell a deeper story about how America was built, and the album lays it out without sugarcoating.

In folk tradition, Young gives the songs new life by reconfiguring (and electrifying) them with his longtime band Crazy Horse, their first collaboration since 2003. For this quartet with decades of shared history, the process of recording is a kind of folk music; they set up and play in real time, letting the music ebb and surge in the moment with little regard to technical precision or steady tempos. Snippets of conversation between songs enhance the feeling of a studio session with all the formality of a campfire sing-along. An unusually intense sing-along with electric guitars, that is.

These performances don’t want to further embalm the folk classics; they aim to amplify the blood and violence beneath the preschool-approved melodies. Young’s guitar punches out Morse code notes, shadowboxing with Frank “Pancho” Sampedro’s rhythm guitar and Billy Talbot’s bass. Ralph Molina’s drumming moves like a locomotive: deliberate, massive, punctuated by cymbal splashes that suggest a train-whistle blast.

Together, they strip the songs of easy familiarity and create a narrative of how America was shaped and at what cost. The tragedy of “Clementine” is laid bare with ghostly harmonies, thundering tom-tom drums and craggy guitars. “Tom Dula” loses the buoyancy of the Kingston Trio hit version from the ’50s (when it was known as “Tom Dooley”). The backing chorus sounds like the restless hectoring of a crowd gathered in the town square for a hanging. They circle like vultures as Young burrows into the song’s brooding, murder-ballad origins.

“Gallows Pole” shifts the perspective to the condemned, who pleads for a little more time so that his lover might arrive to bribe the executioner for his freedom. In this cut-throat world, darkly comedic relief is provided by “Get a Job,” in which Crazy Horse injects the silky elegance of doo-wop with a shot of recession blues. The deceptively jaunty, country-flavored “Travelin’ On” traces the path of a drifter on the lam.

“Americana” reveals the hard truth inside songs that have been taken for granted. Not anymore.