Okay, so remember Trans? If you know anything about it, you probably know the backstory — legendarily weird 1982 all-vocoder experiment, produced in homage to Kraftwerk; resulted in Geffen Records suing Young for producing "deliberately uncommercial and unrepresentative work." But: has anyone actually heard it?

I ask because Trans is the first thing that leapt to my mind when first hearing Young's latest, Daniel Lanois-produced record Le Noise. The parallels between the two albums are nebulous, but they are both driven by a Captain-Ahab sense of deranged aesthetic mission and are tinged by a difficult-to-define pathos. Trans, after all, was motivated not just by Kraftwerk-love but by Young's attempts to communicate with his newborn son, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy. With Le Noise, there is the similar sense that Young has taken a couple of animating ideas — in this senses, rawness and immediacy — and taken them to their illogical extremes. The result is a compellingly inchoate music that sometimes feels in the process of being born inside of your headphones.

To wit: Le Noise consists of eight tracks of Neil banging a guitar in a barren wilderness of echo and jarring, glitchy tape loops. The fuzztone power chords… read more »