Neil Young - "Le Noise"

Neil Young has released an album titled Le Noise that isn't very noisy. He utilizes the tools of bands I consider noisy. He plays with noise. There is looping and multitracking and what most people would think of as echo but which is most likely a technique I've seen other artists do where a live sample is played back through the monitor. There's feedback and there’s fuzz. But until the last track on the album, there's no real play for volume. And even then there's nothing discordant and out of place. There's a wall of sound but it isn't a big wall. It's more like a little fence you'd keep around your vegetables to keep the squirrels out.

Neil Young has collaborated with Daniel Lanois as a producer. Maybe the title is a pun on that man's surname. When I was a sophomore in college, Daniel Lanois seemed to produce all of my favorite albums. They were big, sprawling things designed to make you visualize the exact moment you'd pull out the lighter when you'd eventually hear the songs live; albums that made you do embarrassing things while listening to them on the bus on the way to school like doing the serious worldly stare into the distance or pulling your teeth over your bottom lip while contemplating the depth and meaning and international importance of that U2 or Peter Gabriel track. In trying to block these moments from my psyche, I turned Daniel Lanois into a punchline: the definition of bombast and melodrama in rock music. But there's no bombast or melodrama in Le Noise. Its messages are straightforward, simple and poetic. Songs that could have been anthems are statements: rugged, personal statements that feel like they’re being delivered in a closed space. I wouldn't know when to start swaying in the arena.

Neil Young has recorded a solo album. This isn't in any way surprising. The album plays like a series of poems pieced together by an artist as a reflection of his life as he approaches age 65. It is intensely autobiographical. The lyrics are strewn with something that isn't quite regret, but with a reflection that comes when one realizes that life is trial-and-error and that mistakes are made. There are moments throughout indicating love gone bad, the separation of friends and colleagues, and a bit of self-doubt and wishfulness. But what is surprising is how this solo album is defined. It's not “the Neil has chosen to act without a set band but with a few trusted musicians” type of solo album. This time it's all Neil taking responsibility for every word, every note, every spaceship beep, every repeated sound, every special effect, every bit of distortion. And for some incredibly solid and graceful guitar playing. And for that classic, nasal voice o his singing plaintively with an affection for what he's doing that enters the room as you play the album aloud.

Ironically enough, the most moving song may be the most unadorned. ‘Love and War’ starts with the admission "when I sing about love and war, I don't really know what I'm saying." He's completely correct. Although he's the man who warned us "only love can break your heart" qualifying him better than most at knowing about love and despite his courage in releasing Living With War, nobody really understands these concepts. Has a song ever defined love? Has it ever stopped a war or at least stopped people fussing and fighting long enough to sing along? No, I would say not. And yet, it's the artist's job most of all to discern why people love and why they hate. And 40 years into the gig, it's got to be really frustrating. Even if you're Neil Young. "They try to tell them and they try to explain why Daddy won't ever come home again. Daddy won't ever come home...." What else can you say? "I sang for justice" Neil tells us "and I hit a bad chord."

But other artists would have stopped trying and, God, you have to love Neil Young for still trying.

Because nobody knows how to explain the unexplainable including the current era where nothing makes sense, which is only the most recent in a long series of eras where nothing makes sense. In ‘Angry World’ Neil tells us:

Some see life as a broken promise.
Some see life as an endless fight.
They think they live in the age of darkness.
They think they live in the age of light.

But despite it being an angry world "everything is gonna be all right." And despite giving us yet another lesson in North American imperialism in ‘Peaceful Valley Boulevard’ which is profound, but not as profound as ‘Pocahantas’, Neil generally settles for saying he doesn't have an answer. The first act of the album, prior to ‘Love and War’ consists of what seem like personal messages between individuals about the need for companionship, unconditional love, and safety. They're tender and yet somehow make the best use of the electric waves of the guitar and the sense of recording in an echo chamber. They could just as well have been recorded acoustically but Young and Lanois chose to make them sound like the sounds from a road at three in the morning. The noise isn't just a game. It's calculated and creates something more melancholy than a single guitar, which is astounding to someone who's always thought a single guitar defined melancholy.

I have to note here that the vocal looping effect when used in the otherwise stellar ‘Someone's Gonna Rescue You’ does veer a bit to the silly. However, when it's used in ‘Angry World’ with the repeated phrase "Hate me" it's one of the most powerful effects on the album. Nothing is overdone or done without a purpose, but sometimes things don't work. I'll probably regret saying that in ten years.

The penultimate track "The Hitchhiker" takes us on a journey of drug abuse spanning decades. Those sonic effects really highlight the part about drug-induced paranoia for sure and he expresses no regrets at that first hit of hash through a hollowed-out pen and satirically looks at the good intentions of the pot farm while recognizing how it all affected him ("my head did explode") and those who tried to love him. And when he brings it all home in the loudest track (‘The Rumble’) he doesn't offer solutions. He asks for the person that will bring people together, noting that it's not him.

It's the privilege of the artist, when people are willing to listen, to be able to examine and reassess. You are allowed at 65 to admit you've hit bad chords and even if you say nothing particularly new, you can say it in different ways. Give Neil Young credit for being a complex human being, for never resting on his laurels, for always experimenting even if the experiments don't work. This one does, and if it feels like an epilogue, it's just because we've all been on the journey with Neil for the extent of our own lives, triumphs, and regrets. The world keeps turning though and, fate-willing, everything will be all right and in ten years we can call yet another Neil Young album his best in a decade.