Le Noise (2010)

Dub, when done right, is one of the most magical production styles in music. My first experience was when I discovered The Orb in high school and went down a deep orb-shaped hole with them for awhile. Their use of it was centered on techno music but the reverb, delays, and other studio tricks gave so much space and dimension to music, I was astounded. And, of course, the all consuming bass. Then Massive Attack invited Mad Professor to do a version of their album Protection called No Protection. Hearing that is almost a holy experience. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby, as well as the unique sound of early dubstep (Pinch’s “Qawwali” comes to mind) where dub was combined with slowed down drum ‘n’ bass to create a cavernous sound that changed London forever. Lately, I’ve really been into Deadbeat and Om Unit and their take on minimalist dub (check out their beautiful collaboration Root, Stalk, Leaf and Bloom).

I had no idea Neil made a dub album. Of course, this is not a typical dub album by any means, but it’s definitely Neil-Young-making-a-dub-album, nevertheless. What a strange idea. The story goes that he saw producer Daniel Lanois’ videos for his project Black Dub and called him up to propose working together in the same method, same house, same techniques, same filmmaker to document it. Lanois co-produced U2’s legendary early albums with Brian Eno before going on to work with pretty much everyone. Neil and Lanois working on a project together seems like something that should have happened before this (and something I’d like to see again).

Lanois respected Neil’s full moon schedule but also pushed him to write about what he was feeling at this particular moment. Le Noise is bookended by two important deaths. Two months before recording, Neil’s close friend and long time filmmaker Larry Johnson dies. Johnson was incredibly special to Neil, especially because of Johnson’s closeness and inclusion of Neil’s son Ben. In Waging Heavy Peace, Neil talks a lot about how Larry would take Ben with him everywhere. Two weeks after recording stopped, Long Grain himself, Ben Keith, dies from a heart attack while staying on Neil’s Broken Arrow ranch. The album is released two months later.

The sound of Le Noise (a respectful pun) is unique in that its mostly Neil playing an electric guitar solo. Usually Neil plays acoustic solo, and that was the original intention for the album, but they tried going electric and it changed everything. Particularly because Neil’s Gretsch White Falcon allowed Lanois to separate the bass and treble strings into separate amps and manipulate them independent of each other. It creates a “wall of sound” style that is truly impressive. It’s a fascinating production and I found an in-depth article on Sound on Sound that describes it in great detail.

When you stood in the centre of the room, it was the best sound you've ever heard, it was incredible. We had those speakers going at full tilt, and when you put your hand on the walls, they were shaking. It was almost earthquake material!

I had Neil's amps with me in the room, and with all this big reverberation going on, the house became a speaker cabinet. It was jaw‑dropping, and Neil felt like a rock god! The sound of 'Hitchhiker' that you hear on the album was pretty much the one that I dialed up while he was playing. Dan would be there with me, and over my shoulder would also dub vocals and trip them out. It was like a tag‑team situation, where I'd have the vocal, and he the echo, and he'd trap it and spin it. It's the whole dub thing, and very Jamaican.

Neil was pushing us, saying, 'Hey guys, that's great, just take it to the next level. Give me more of that!' (engineer Mark Howard, Sound on Sound, 2011)

“Walk With Me” get us started, with the White Falcon split between two channels and Neil’s voices echoing subtly. Amidst the sonic tricks, he pleads his love to join him. It’s a good way to start the album. The dub effects are present but restrained, so as not to shock long time fans, but as the song drifts away, more and more layers are delayed and manipulated. The next song, “Sign of Love,” continues the same sound (and theme) but with a cavernous reverb on Neil’s vocal. The end of his verses careen around this cavern as the guitar gets more and more abstracted. I love the way a sound just clips off mid delay in the last part of the song. I get the sense these songs felt like big machines starting up and then shuddering a bit as they wind down. The effects are really lovely and prominent on “Someone’s Gonna Rescue You.” There’s a quiet rhythm created by the high fidelity capture of Neil’s fingers on the strings/guitar body, too. While the first two songs are likely about Pegi, I think this one is about his son Ben’s struggles with cerebral palsy. His friends and family weight heavily on this album, for sure.

For me, the strongest song on the album is “Love and War,” an acoustic number that in some ways sums up the themes of most of Neil’s music. He’s either talking about social issues or relationships. He masterfully melds the two on this song. The effects are handled with a soft touch, mostly enhancing the musical bridges, and carefully not taking over the gentle messages contained herein. There’s a humility and awareness in Neil’s lyrics here that have been a bit lacking in the previous few years. Together with Lanois’ production and the gorgeous guitar playing, it creates one of Neil’s best songs in years. I give Lanois a lot of credit here, as he seems like a producer that might push Neil like Briggs might have. The prior few years were mostly Neil doing whatever he wanted to dash off, as opposed to carefully crafting an album. Would love to see Lanois and Neil work together again.

“Angry World” is probably my least favorite song here, despite loving the extreme sonics it plays with. Neil approaches good points here, but this song feels like it should be with a full band (Crazy Horse, perhaps). It might have been a sequel to “Rockin’ in the Free World” with the right band. Still, he won a Grammy (his first) off this vocal, so what do I know. The oldest song on the album dates back to the previously unreleased 1976 album Hitchhiker, which we would finally get in 2017 (big fan of that one). It’s the only song on the album to use Old Black instead of the White Falcon, saying it just felt right to use it here. A classic Neil Young drug epic of which he had many in the 70s, with modern production techniques updates the messages and warnings of it for the modern era. He was seeing younger artists (and old friends) falling into the same traps and there’s a slight exasperation present in his voice that shows his state of mind well.

At first, I didn’t like “Peaceful Valley Boulevard” at all, hearing a bit too much “China Girl” in its guitar melody and wondering what the hell he was doing. The more I listened to this album, though, I realized it was really the follow-up to “Pocahontas” and “Cortez the Killer” that fans have been looking for. He previously delved into that with “Like a Inca” to mixed results. However, “Peaceful Valley Boulevard” is as if he considered how he told “Crime in the City” to be the way into the messages he wanted to talk about. That is, the narrative is strong and slice of life, but still psychedelic. The effects are lovely and haunting, the acoustic guitar expertly handled. Whatever you have to say about Neil, his acoustic skill is simply gorgeous. This and “Love and War” prove it without a doubt. Honestly…I wish that the original idea for this album as an acoustic album would have happened. It works so well.

We end with the abstract feedback behemoth “Rumblin’,” which reminds me quite a bit of what Neil did on the Dead Man soundtrack. He knows how to craft guitar noise into a sonic landscape for sure. Lanois and Howard capture that noise and loop it around his vocal in a fitting end. Neil lays his thoughts bare with a lot of self awareness. It’s no wonder he started writing his first memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, a year later. “When will I learn how to give back? / When will I learn how to heal?” could speak to any number of moments in Neil’s history, but the ghost of Danny Whitten was certainly on his mind.

Top 3:

1. Love and War
2. Peaceful Valley Boulevard
3. Rumblin’

Cut song: Angry World (mostly because I think it belongs on a different album)

Adam CK Vollick directed a long form video for Le Noise. There are two versions of this, a 39-minute one on Youtube that’s limited to just the album tracks and a 80-minute version on Neil Young Archives with making of clips and extra songs that didn’t make the cut. I watched the long version. It’s really fun, filled with a lot of up close views of Neil crafting these songs alongside Lanois and Howard. It begins with Neil talking a bit about the songs rattling around in his head, and ends with him recording a long droning instrumental until the system eventually shorts out. A fitting finale. Every song on the album is represented with a performance of some kind, alongside several songs that don’t make the album. “You Never Call” is about Larry Johnson and is a bit sad, and a bit awkwardly phrased. He tries it here in two different forms, including on an organ. A trio of Psychedelic Pill songs show up here first: “For the Love of Man,” “Twisted Road,” and a really great rendition of “Born in Ontario.” Vollick’s style is up close and expressive with a lot of cool shaking to simulate the quaking feel of the recording described above. He will go on to work with Neil a lot more after this. Check out either version I linked to if you can!

Neil Young Journeys is the last of Jonathan Demme’s films covering Neil Young. It’s centered around a pair of performances at Massey Hall (site of my favorite live album!) in Toronto from May 2011. The performances are in support of Le Noise and use that album as a jumping off point, so Neil is unaccompanied and plays album tracks as well as classics with the same style. So you get light dub effects in older songs like “Ohio.” Very cool. Interspersed throughout are scenes of Neil driving around in one of his classic cars giving Demme the history of growing up outside Toronto. Neil’s brother Bob joins them, too. It’s endearing and gives you a good sense of how important Neil’s hometown is to him. Very recommended (as are the other two Demme films).

For context, I listened to a full show on Neil Young Archives from a year earlier (in the midst of album recording, really) and it’s quite beautiful. You can hear the mourning in Neil’s voice and song choice. “Love and War” would be new to this audience in May 2010 but the response is rapturous. The dub effects work really well. I’m not sure how he did them, honestly. From the film, he doesn’t appear to be triggering effects, so maybe his house engineer Tim Mulligan was doing it. Some of the electric guitar material is a tiny bit muddy, but nonetheless extremely interesting. Hearing “Down by the River” or “Cortez the Killer” without the rhythm section is a profoundly different experience. Another tour I wish I had had the sense to attend (I get the sense the response to this tour was very mixed). Thank Neil for the Archives once again. It’s a tremendous gift to have access to decades of live shows straight from the source.

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