Young and Lanois – two recording obsessives prepared to go to Edisonian lengths to render the lost chord in as much grimy detail as possible. The pair have shared studio space before – Neil cameo’d on Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball – but this time it’s personal. Lanois built an audiophile’s spiderweb decorated with custom built electro-acoustic hybrid instruments, provided suitably far-out ambience in his studio in Silverlake, LA, and dared Neiler to walk away.
It’s hardly hyperbole to suggest this is probably Young’s most sonically... innaresting album since Trans. All the tracks are solo performances built around overdriven guitar figures, self-generated loops and swathes of feedback.
Suits him too. Had the opening ‘Walk With Me’ been lumbered with a lumpen rhythm section, it might have passed as standard On The Beach period mid-tempo electric Neil. Here it sounds like a man standing on a mountain top, voice and guitar echoing back from the canyons.
Boiled to its essence, Le Noise is a seamless reconciliation of Neil’s acoustic troubadour incarnation with Arc-Weld/Dead Man feedback brinkmanship, while sounding like neither. Check out ‘Sign Of Love’, a paean to silver-haired autumn love that sounds like ‘Sedan Delivery’ done hombre lobo with psychedelic phasing.
Not that he’s afraid to play it straight either. ‘Love And War’ mines the broody atmosphere of Freedom’s ‘El Dorado’ and channels it into bald autobiography: “I sang for justice and I hit a bad chord/ but I still tried to sing about love and war”. ‘Hitchiker’ is even more confessional, an agitated ‘70s drug travelogue viewed backwards through paranoid eyes, with a nod to the aforementioned Trans: “I thought I was an Aztec/ Or a runner in Peru/ I could build such beautiful buildings/ To house the chosen few/ Like an Inca from Peru.” And there’s something rather affecting about a 64-year-old man singing, “When will I learn how to listen?/ When will I learn how to feel?” (‘Rumblin’’).
Le Noise exposes a few of the things non-believers find so exasperating about Neil’s willful simplicity, but it also captures pretty much everything that makes him magic. Play by candle light wrapped in a blanket, with a skin-you wind whipping at the windows.
Key track: ‘Hitchiker’