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The Badger Herald

The Student News Site of University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Badger Herald

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Neil Young delivers beloved signature wailing, yet lacks musical diversity

Neil Young fans are always on the defensive about the Canadian rocker’s unique voice, sound and endless musical transformations. His consistent, often endearing, emotional sincerity is one of the many factors that attracts the loyalty of his listeners. From Harvest to Tonight’s the Night to his more recent Fork in the Road, Young’s nasal twang has punctuated his albums with a kind of impassioned uncertainty: of love, war, the road, happiness, needles (and damages done), justice, Mother Nature, etc. While usually limiting himself to a few themes to be explored at an album’s length, on Le Noise he finds it appropriate to jam each half-baked universality into a short collection of silly, tired maxims characterized by a lyrical certainty that is so concise it’s confusing.

The album’s first song, “Walk with Me,” starts out refreshingly familiar: High reverb and simple progressions strummed with earnestness. It doesn’t take long for the song to realize (due both to Young’s overly simplistic, rhymed lyrics and to the album’s novel, electronic production) that it isn’t entirely sure where it’s headed.

The aged songwriter seems to be suffering from artistic senility, his songs representing both long and short-term musical memory loss. As the first track becomes the second (“Sign of Love”), Young’s words become muddled: “When we both have silver hair and a little less time, but there’s still our roses on the vine.” Even through the incoherence of neglectful conjunctions and mismatched tenses, all Young seems to be attempting is a lazy reiteration of words already sung.

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Several tracks in, Young gives us a moment of clarity: “When I sing about love and war, I don’t really know what I’m saying.” The song’s title, oddly enough: “Love and War.”

At the start, the album’s most generic encapsulation of two of Young’s greatest themes, he grants a whiff of uncertainty. At this point, one track after another becomes a sad harkening to Young songs of old. The frustration of “Angry World” is better expressed by any track off Tonight’s the Night; “Hitchhiker,” just another drugs-on-the-road hymn; and “Rumblin’,”  the album’s topper, could have been a line once crossed out from a verse of “Natural Beauty.” Alternately, listeners versed in Young’s work know that part of his music’s beauty comes from its simplicity; although, with Le Noise he takes it a little far.

Looking beyond the album’s word-work, though, our favorite old sentimental wailer has produced a nice bit of listening. Young’s guitar work feels like a solo, electrified jam session gone terribly right, with all the passionately simple chord changes he’s never failed to dazzle us with.

Stylistically, Le Noise is one of Young’s least internally diverse albums. Each song is more or less a continuation of the last, his acoustic/electric change-ups paced flawlessly, as always. It plays like a grittier, more melodic rehashing of his soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man.”

The album makes for a respectable collection of Neil Young’s signature blues-rock, and Daniel Lanois’ production gives it a unique sound. Due to the nature of its lyrics though, those who aren’t already loyal fans (or otherwise understand little to no English) may have a tough time getting through.

3 out of 5 stars

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