The last time Neil Young came to Vienna was six years ago, touring on the back of the Chrome Dreams II album. That show, in the slightly odd surroundings of the Austria Center (which has rarely been used for rock concerts since; maybe they were put off by the fact that the audience nearly broke the floor with their jumping up and down) was a relatively user-friendly affair, with an acoustic set followed by an electric set and a fairly generous helping of Young’s greatest hits. Wednesday night’s concert, on the other hand, was definitely one for the diehards, with extended jams aplenty and an acoustic set that lasted for only two songs – one of which, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, added up to not much more than glorified busking. And yet this was the one that played out in front of a capacity audience in the soulless barn that is the Stadthalle, with its muddy acoustics, concession stands and endless parade of people wandering around the place. All of which goes to show, as if it needed reiterating, that nothing is predictable in the world of Neil Young.

The other big difference between the 2008 and 2014 concerts, of course, was that this time Young had brought his legendary backing band Crazy Horse with him. And while there’s clearly no “right” or “best” way to see Young, given the plethora of styles and configurations at which he excels, there’s no denying the crackle of excitement that greeted his entrance onstage accompanied by rhythm guitarist Frank Sampedro, drummer Ralph Molina and substitute bassist Rick Rosas, along with two excellent female backing singers.

With barely a nod to the audience, the evening kicked off with a barnstorming take on “Love and Only Love” from 1990’s seminal Ragged Glory album. Young and Sampedro fell straight into a lengthy dialogue, their guitar licks meshing together in loose but controlled interplay. It was a full four minutes before Young stepped up to the mic, his unique and still haunting voice testifying to the song’s powerful message: “Love and only love will endure/Hate is everything you think it is/Love and only love will break it down/Break it down, break it down.”

On the other hand, if there’s one thing Neil Young has been at pains to communicate in his almost 50-year career, it’s that love is not all you need. The strongest emotion emanating from the stage was not love but anger – and righteous anger at that, borne of an abiding and passionate humanitarian conscience. The singer’s black hat stayed stubbornly on his head for almost the entire evening, but from my vantage point fairly close to the stage (or, if you must, from the video screens on either side), it was clear that his mouth was set in a more or less permanent snarl. It was as though these long (14 cuts in two hours), serpentine songs, their distorted shapes hewn from volume and electricity, were the only possible response to an ongoing crisis of global proportions.

That response was inscribed not only in the more hard-rocking numbers like “Love to Burn” and the inevitable main-set closer “Rockin’ in the Free World”, but also in the more elegiac moments such as “Living with War” and “Cortez the Killer”. “Cortez” in particular was exquisite, with Young drawing out long, achingly tender cadences to frame the song’s narrative of love and sacrifice. When not at the mic Young was most often to be found squaring up to Sampedro, the two men seemingly oblivious to all but the music binding them together, a touching image of two sexagenarians holding fast in the storm.

Given the depth of Young’s back catalogue, there will always be gripes about the setlist, with regrets over omitted songs an inevitable aspect of any post-gig discussion. In my case, the absence of “Like a Hurricane”, “Hey Hey My My”, “Powderfinger” and “Cinnamon Girl” was particularly keenly felt. It was also unfortunate, though perfectly understandable, that Young chose to round off the evening with the bouncy but rather cheesy new song “Who’s Gonna Stand Up And Save The Earth?” But such disappointments count for little when weighed against the urgency and vitality that Neil Young, at 68, still brings to everything he does.

A storming three-hour show last night by Neil Young in the unlikely surroundings of the Austria Center. (In fact the sound was better than expected, although the sightlines were predictably poor.)

The first set saw Young deliver a set of lovely solo acoustic songs, switching between guitar and piano (with one song on banjo). I enjoyed watching him wander among his guitars before each song, seemingly trying to decide which of his old friends to hold a conversation with. It’s wonderful the way these songs take the everyday and quotidian and invest them with such mystical, charged significance. And after all these years, his voice is still a thing of beauty. “After the Gold Rush” was just spellbinding. A great shame he didn’t speak at all between songs, though – the fact that he never addressed the audience made the set feel considerably less intimate (insofar as any gig in a conference centre could ever be called intimate) and gave it the air of a formal recital.

For the second part of the evening, though, no talking was required; Young’s electric guitar spoke more eloquently than any words could have done. When “Hey Hey My My” kicked in the hall just erupted, and there was even an announcement from Young at the song’s end (which presumably he had had relayed to him from the side of the stage), to the effect that the venue management were concerned about the resilience of the floor to too much jumping up and down. (The hall is on the first floor of the centre.) The electric storm didn’t subside until almost two hours later. “Powderfinger” was massive, “Cinnamon Girl” wild, but the undoubted highlight was a song I hadn’t heard before, “No Hidden Path”. This monster proceeded for what must have been at least 20 minutes, with Young spitting molten fire from his guitar every second. Just… immense.

It wasn’t until someone pointed it out to me that I noticed that there was a bloke in a cowboy hat onstage, painting on canvas during the whole of the first set. It was some kind of picture of two birds in a field. At the start of each song during the second set, a painting depicting that song was placed on an easel at stage left. The bird painting, evidently finished by then, made its appearance during the song “Winterlong”, which Young dedicated to his late band member Danny Whitten. This primitivist multimedia presentation seemed to reinforce my overriding impression of Young’s music – wholehearted, slightly ramshackle and formidably evocative.