NEIL YOUNG Pushing for truth and justice.

In late April, while CNN reported George W. Bush's national approval rating at 32 percent and falling, another news report came through: Neil Young had a surprise album ready for release. Unbeknownst to his label, Warner Brothers, Young wrote and recorded Living With War — a blistering 10-song set including "Let's Impeach the President" and "Looking for a Leader" — in a two-week creative burst.

Artists from Pink to TV on the Radio and Pearl Jam have recently released anti-Bush tracks, but with Young stepping to the plate with an entire album about this war-mad administration, it feels like popular culture — usually a mere diversion from mundane existence — just might pierce the political apathy of our nation. (Music from Living With War also will be debuted in concert during Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 30-plus date Freedom of Speech '06 Tour, which hits Columbus on August 29.)

"Won't need no shadow man running the government/won't need no stinking war ... after the garden is gone," Young sings on "After The Garden," his electric guitar burning brighter than the bombs over Mesopotamia that are destroying the very Eden he speaks of. With a surging chorus and the kind of backbeat stomp that's been Young's lifeblood since the '60s, that anthem is the full-force opener for an album that's Young's best since 1990's Ragged Glory.

While there's no way you can listen to the album and not feel both Young's anger towards the Bush administration and his empathy for the American people, the man well knows that kick-ass rock 'n' roll trumps plenipotentiary polemics every time, and delivers accordingly.

Bassist Rick Rosas and drummer Chad Cromwell lock into galloping grooves that'd do Crazy Horse proud, and Young plays his axe Old Black at the point where jolting distortion achieves absolute clarity of purpose: to cut through the Bushit. To call Living With War a "folk metal protest" album (as Young has) is apt. "Shock & Awe" turns the familiar melody of "Scarborough Fair" into a grinding reminder of exactly what's happened since a jumpsuited Dubya declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard the USS Lincoln on May 2, 2003: "Thousands of bodies in the ground/brought home in boxes to a trumpet sound/no one sees them/coming home that way." "Flags of Freedom" updates Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom," as a girl watches her soldier brother head off to Iraq, flags fly and Young wonders, "Do you think that you believe in yours more than they do theirs somehow?"

The key to Living With War is its 100-plus-member backing choir, not only for the beauty of its singing (particularly on the album-ending "America The Beautiful" and the get-down Southern gospel feel of "Let's Impeach the President"), but also for how the choir transforms the voice of a solitary protest singer into the force of multitudes united. "Let's Impeach the President" begins with a bugle playing "Hail to the Chief" before Young details Bush's impeachable offenses and asks the pointed question, "What if al Qaeda had blown up the levees/would New Orleans have been safer that way?"

A series of self-incriminating Bush soundbites ("war is my last choice") plays while Young cries "Flip! Flop!" While that rhetorical tactic was used against Kerry during the Republican National Convention, this isn't an album about party politics — Young backed Reagan, after all, and was an early supporter of the Patriot Act. It's about the horrible toll taken on families on both sides of the Iraq war, and our need for a real leader. (And Young's rap on the fade-out of "Impeach" about the President's timely opposition to steroid use in baseball is a comedic zinger worthy of Stephen Colbert's extraordinary remarks at the recent White House Correspondents Press Dinner.)

Music may not be able to change politics, but it can transform society, and Living With War has the potential to do exactly that. Considering its subject matter, the album could've been a major downer, and after all, no one rides bummers like Neil Young. But by making an inspiring and invigorating record — one of the best, most purposeful albums of his storied career — Neil Young is pushing for truth and justice, the American way.