Neil Young: Le Noise

[rating=3.50]

Neil Young has just about done everything in his 50 year career:   country, new-wave, CSNY, Crazy Horse, Pearl Jam, rockabilly, proto-grunge, acoustic folk, rock operas, films, and the list goes on.  But it took until 2010 for Young to do something entirely different – record an album without any backing musicians.  Le Noise, produced by Daniel Lanois, is only eight songs long, perhaps quite brief, but the novelty of hearing only Young in this sparse capacity makes it a creative winner, unlike his last studio effort, 2009’s alternative energy themed  Fork In The Road.  With the recent deaths of longtime sideman Ben Keith and collaborator Larry Johnson, there is a haunting vibe to Le Noise that permeates Young’s guitar and fragile voice, giving the recording some three foot tusks.

In the cryptic opener “Walk With Me,” Young suggests “I lost some people I was travelling with” perhaps a nod to his on-again off -again relationship with one of his many former band-mates, who he’s been know to isolate, just when they needed him the most. “Sign of Love,” although solo, sounds like it can transform easily into the Crazy Horse catalog with its ragged electric energy, making it one of the few songs on Le Noise that can reappear with future electric configurations.

Young has written a handful of songs about “love and war” and when he sings those same ol’ words on “Love and War,” it makes us wonder – “come on Neil, don’t you have something different?  Well, while Neil Young can be blamed for using the same exact chords for certain songs, he’s never been accused of being lazy on his lyrics.  For the first time Young recycles his own lyrics on “Hitchhiker” where uses the same chorus he used in "Like An Inca” off 1982’s Trans.   This “different” autobiographical song reveals Young’s history with drugs from amphetamines, hash, cocaine and  weed, while making each experiment appear as a valid life phase   “Peaceful Valley Boulevard,” come off almost identical musically  to “Natural Beauty” from Harvest Moon, is again, not anything new for Young either, but built around his picked and strummed acoustic guitar work, no matter how much its “been there done that,”  somehow it remains relevant.

Neil Young is a career artist, one who can get away with the artistic freedom younger acts only salivate of (good luck MGMT on your third album).  Hard to believe it, but Le Noise begins a new chapter in Young’s solo, no band-mate phase.  Let le noise keep on coming.

Related Content

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter