Send "Neil Young " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Neil Young is easily the most frustrating of the old-school rock legends. His M.O. puts a premium on spontaneity, which means that a number of his albums feature ideas that could have benefited from a little refinement, or, in some cases, that should not have come to fruition at all (“I’ll write an album about my electric car!”). At the same time, though, this approach has also yielded his most compelling music, including some made after many of his contemporaries had ceased even aspiring to relevance. This is why I’m not alone in believing that Neil Young has one more classic album left in him, when few would express similar hopes about, say, the Rolling Stones. I’ve also been afraid that this great album would trickle out, one song at a time, over Young’s next eight or nine records.Thankfully, Le Noise solves that. It’s fantastic. It’s his best in decades, at least since Ragged Glory. It’s also without a clear precedent in Young’s catalogue. Sidestepping the mellow acoustic/barnstorming electric dichotomy that characterizes nearly everything Young has done, Le Noise is solo electric—just Young and his crushing guitar. It’s loud and heavy enough to satisfy adrenaline junkies and Crazy Horse fans, but retains a starkness and immediacy that would be difficult to replicate in a full-band setting. Its relatively concise 38-minute runtime keeps the admittedly limited sonic palette from wearing thin, and the swirling echoes of Young’s voice and guitar (presumably courtesy of producer Daniel Lanois) fill out the sound, and add an air of psychedelic mystery. The opening songs, “Walk with Me” and “Sign of Love” are perhaps the record’s least successful. They’re still really good, mind you; it’s just not until the minor arpeggios and falsetto vocals of “Someone’s Gonna Rescue You” that the album truly kicks into high gear. “Love and War” changes the tone with an acoustic folk song about the titular topics, as well as a songwriter’s attempts to make sense of them. “Angry World” marries ambiguous lyrics that are either a howl of frustration or a condemnation of bitterness and cynicism to a brutally heavy riff. It works. It’s awesome....full text |
| Guardian |
| It perhaps befits a wilfully contrary artist that a bad review might act as the best advert imaginable for his new album. One august rock critic has already deemed Le Noise, his collaboration with U2 and Dylan producer Daniel Lanois, unlistenable. It's a response that should cause the ears of long-term Young fans to prick up. His worst records don't really incite that kind of violent reaction: they're just boring. Furthermore, someone like him said something like that at every vital moment in Young's career – from David Crosby's spluttering disbelief that he'd abandon CSNY for Crazy Horse, a band that "never should have been allowed to be musicians at all", to the yells of horror that greeted Tonight's the Night, to Graham Nash's response to 1988's return-to-raging-form Eldorado: "I absolutely hate this record." It's hard not to picture the august rock critic huffing away without thinking: "Hmm, this could be interesting." Buy it from Buy the CD Download as MP3 Neil Young Le Noise Reprise 2010 Your interest might be piqued further not so much by Lanois's sonic approach – which largely sets Young's singing against the sound of his own ferociously distorted electric guitar, occasionally looping his voice to unsettling effect – but by the circumstances surrounding the album. While you don't want to wish the old guy any ill, contentment doesn't suit Neil Young, at least artistically. His best work – from 1974's On the Beach to 1995's Sleeps With Angels – has been born out of turmoil, and Le Noise arrives haunted. Filmmaker Larry Johnson, who collaborated with Young for four decades, died suddenly in January, while longstanding sideman Ben Keith died of a heart attack at Young's home in July. Judging by Le Noise's contents, their deaths seem to have simultaneously rattled and re-energised him. Whatever the qualities of his recent fair-to-middling efforts – they all had their moments – his songwriting here sounds more pointed and self-aware than it has in years. "Walk with me," suggests Young on the album opener. A cynical voice – possibly belonging to Crosby, Stills, Nash or another musician who's enjoyed a mercurial relationship with him over the years – might note that this is a fairly resistible offer, given that walking with Neil Young almost invariably ends in Neil Young suddenly buggering off with someone else and abandoning you in the middle of nowhere. But Young is there before you: "I lost some people I was travelling with," he cries, sounding genuinely regretful, as the song dissolves into tumultuous feedback. In recent years, Young has dipped into his vast catalogue of unreleased songs in order to prop up albums of uninspired latterday material, with inevitable results. The 25-year-old Ordinary People was so much better than anything else on Chrome Dreams II that it sparked glum thoughts. Even his material from the 80s – a decade when Young was widely presumed to have gone completely bananas, given that he spent it insisting A Flock of Seagulls were the future of music and worrying that Aids could be transmitted by touching potatoes that had been handled by gay men – was vastly superior to the contemporary stuff....full text |
| Antiquiet |
| A modern-grit reflective masterpiece wasn’t exactly what Neil Young had in mind when he sat down to write Le Noise, but the greatest creations never seem to fit their intended mold. This eight-song album is a collaboration between the Rock icon and Grammy-winning producer/songwriter Daniel Lanois, known for his work with U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno and many more. The title is an obvious wink to Young’s new recording partner, whose nuanced expressions in production – whether through looped vocals, electronic enhancements or instrumental character wizardry – played an elemental role in the album’s powerful flavor. The duo’s musical relationship has been forged over the course of many years and many music events, but Le Noise marks the first time the two have recorded together. Laid down at Lanois’ home in the hipster mecca known as the Silverlake area of Los Angeles, Le Noise features Young on uniquely designed acoustic and electric guitars with Lanois’ trademark sonic coloring, resulting in an intensely captivating sound. There is no band, there are no overdubs – just “a man on a stool and me doing a nice job on the recording,” as Lanois puts it. A specially-designed hollow-body Gretsch electric is the primary tool throughout Le Noise, sporting a growly tone not far from Mirrorball’s punky rawness (Angry World is a clear-cut comparative, as is Sign of Love – a track completely owned by the mean-fuzz downstrokes of the guitar). The four-dimensional sound is a fascinating feature for a (somewhat) acoustic guitar, a rich, beautiful low end without the typical bleeding fuzz. A tremolo amplifier and an intensified bass response on the lower two strings fills out the bottom, while a pickup that re-creates the sound of the human voice allows it to loop and echo through the track. “Neil was so appreciative of the sonics that we presented to him,” Lanois tells Billboard. “He walked in the door and I put an acoustic guitar into his hands – one that I had been working on to build a new sound. I wanted him to understand that I’ve spent years dedicated to the sonics in my home and that I wanted to give him something he’d never heard before. He picked up that instrument, which had everything – an acoustic sound, electronica, bass sounds – and he knew as soon as he played it that we had taken the acoustic guitar to a new level. It’s hard to come up with a new sound at the back end of 50 years of rock and roll, but I think we did it.’...full text |
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