Wednesday 29 September 2010



Someone’s gonna resuce you

QBiM SPiNS: Neil Young Le Noise

The sky looked like it was ready to kick le shit out of anyone who tried to get in its way last night.  The cloud’s had a smoky gray underbelly that rippled and snaked across the horizon, directly in front of me as I aimed my car down the highway for home ahead of any tempestuous weather.  My soundtrack for the drive was Le Noise, the new record from Neil Young, produced by Daniel Lanois.  With nothing but a feedback-ridden, squealing  guitar as his accompaniment, Young sounded like he was the voice of the clouds. The opening chords of “Hitchhiker” startled me as I mistook the sound for thunder.  It actually took a few seconds for me to realize the noise was coming from inside the car and not outside.

That, in a nutshell, sums up my initial impressions of Le Noise:  it is an album that unbelievably stretches past its own limitations (i.e. voice, guitar, no overdubs) to sound mammoth, menacing, and occasionally monolithic thanks to the reverb-riddled wall of sound he throws up around tracks like opener “Walk With Me”.  From there on in, Le Noise‘s eight songs spiral in and out of Young’s past and future, from recollecting his drug-addled bygone days of yore on “The Hitchhiker” to looking ahead on “Sign of Love” to a time when he and his lover’s hair has turned a little bit more silver, but love continues to bloom like “roses on the vine”.  It’s not an angry record, as one might imagine from its sonic descriptors, but a very passionate, purposeful work of art.

I’ll be the first to admit that Neil Young has never interested me in the least; my musical tastes rarely look backward, so by the time I started paying attention to music, he already seemed like an icon from the past to me.  I respected the man and his history, but I wasn’t a fan.  Le Noise certainly doesn’t make me want to race out and pick up his back catalogue, because, quite frankly, I know his back catalogue is nothing like this record.  I went out to get this disc today because of Daniel Lanois.  Like Rick Rubin’s work with Johnny Cash, Lanois has approached Young recording reverentially, but with eyes wide open.  Anyone could have let Young plug in and rock out, but the results would have sounded like a demo.  Lanois’ subtle production brings these songs to life, like the droning looped vocals in the background of “Angry World”.  In that regard, Le Noise is very much Lanois’ record, too.  It is the result of a collaboration of two unique men, both with their own musical vision, who’ve allowed each others’ path to cross into their own.  Yesterday may have been the first time I’ve ever rushed out and bought a Neil Young album on the day of its release (okay, it’s also the first time I ever bought a Neil Young album), but if this partnership continues to spawn amazing records, it certainly won’t be the last time.

Le Noise was released September 28, 2010 on Reprise Records.

Video: Neil Young “Angry World”
Video: Neil Young “Hitchhiker”
Video: Neil Young “Love and War”
Myspace: Neil Young





by J. Di Gioia | Comments Off

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under QBiM SPiNS, ViDEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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