Neil Young, “Oceanside Countryside.”

Neil Young has returned with what is to some a holy grail, another unreleased album from the 1970s.

Much like Chrome Dreams, reissued in its original intended form a couple of years ago, the songs from Oceanside Countryside have seen the light of day on various anthologies and with various alternative arrangements. But this new/old album features the tracks as Young originally intended them, before deciding to shelve the record instead. Ours is not to question why.

Oceanside Countryside is a mellow acoustic album infused with Young’s gentle melancholy and unrefined beauty. No overdriven Crazy-Horse-type noise. The album is almost entirely acoustic.

Basically, this is the kind of album The Dude from “The Big Lebowski” would have on his walkman to chill to when not listening to the sounds of bowling. There’s a simple Southern California stoner vibe to the whole endeavor that somehow avoids the schmaltz of The Eagles, who The Dude really doesn’t like.

The opener, “Sail Away,” eventually showed up on Rust Never Sleeps, so any serious fan has already heard it. But still, there’s a little more relevance to Young’s line in the song, “There’s a road stretched out between us like a ribbon on the high plain.” The straightforward, front porch simplicity feels a little deeper, not just as Young gets old, but as the relatively unfettered freshness of the 1970s, lacking the social media, global warming and incessant capitalism of our current vibe recedes further and further from our cultural memory.

“Captain Kennedy,” which wound up on 1980 album Hearts & Doves, sounds like it belongs in another Coen Brothers film, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” The story song about the titular character’s loss on a schooner while fighting the Germans sounds like something the Soggy Bottom Boys might cook up at a country hoedown. Similarly, “DanceDanceDance,” which appeared in electrified form on the Neil Young and Crazy Horse debut album in 1971, is featured here totally acoustic, with the addition of some very down-home fiddle parts.

“Field of Opportunity” gets the fiddle treatment as well. “Human Highway” not only ended up on 1978’s Comes a Time, it was also the title of the 1982 film that served as Young’s directorial debut under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey.

In other words, there’s a fair amount of history and plenty of rabbit holes to dive down on this new/old record. But it’s mostly a history serious fans already know.

It’s emblematic of our current zeitgeist that these artifacts, which reveal the vagaries of artistic intent along with the fickleness of market forces in the previous century, appear before us now, as expensive relics that attest to a purer creative time than we find ourselves in today.

And it’s totally on brand that these new/old albums are pretty expensive. After all, that kind of unfettered artistry doesn’t come cheap.