Neil Young - Le Noise

If the hype for this album stated it was just Neil, his guitar and a bunch of new songs and some old unreleased songs there would have been hordes waiting to pick it up. The fact that its just Neil Young a distorted electric guitar and a strange sonic sounding production by Daniel Lanois (previous works include: U2's The Joshua tree and Bob Dylan's Time out of Mind) led to shorter queues at the tills. There has been some good stuff written about this album and equally some terrible things, one critic called it unlistenable and the reviews on Amazon are of equally divided opinion. I think that after over 40 years of producing music the fact that a new release from Neil Young even divides his own fans is a great thing. I loved this album, his recent releases have been a little hit and miss for me but as soon as I played this I found it the most exciting thing he'd done since ragged glory or sleeps with angels. The songs stripped back to just a fuzzy guitar and echoey vocals highlight the strength of the song writing here with new tracks coupled with some older songs left unrecorded (the hitch hiker shares a verse with like an Inca from Trans).

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Neil Young

1. "Walk with Me" – 5:05


2. "Sign of Love" – 3:58


3. "Someone's Gonna Rescue You" – 3:29


4. "Love and War" – 5:37


5. "Angry World" – 4:11


6. "Hitchhiker" – 5:32


7. "Peaceful Valley Boulevard" – 7:10


8. "Rumblin'" – 3:39

Listen on spotify

Neil Young - Trans

There is a lot said about Neil Young's 1982 experimental album Trans, some good, some bad. I can imagine his fans taking the record home one sunny day in 1982 putting it on and thinking "what the fuck is this?". The electronic theme of the album is carried through with synthesizers and vocoder affected vocals in a majority of the tracks. Listening to it now it does sound rather dated but there is magic there that shines through. One of the things I admire the most about NY is his desire to try new things and experiment and this is one of his most famous experiments. The pretty standard opener Little thing called love lulls you into a soft rock sense of security before the synth heavy track computer age brings you up to date and the feminine sounding vocoder vocals take you straight back to the eighties. The vocoder heavy track transformer man and the classic sample and hold are fantastic. I read once on a classic rock blog about someones hatred for the electronic version of Mr Soul included on the album. I don't know what he's talking about for me it's the definitive version.

Although the most eighties thing about Trans is probably the album cover.

"Little Thing Called Love" – 3:13
"Computer Age" – 5:24
"We R in Control" – 3:31
"Transformer Man" – 3:23
"Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)" – 4:13
"Hold On to Your Love" – 3:28
"Sample and Hold" * –  8:03
"Mr. Soul" – 3:19
"Like an Inca" * –  9:46