As a step along the career ladder, it's comparable to "On The Beach" or "Rust Never Sleeps". Like both those records it has its faults, but its also a show of strength and a proud blow for progress.
Where the acclaimed "Rust Never Sleeps" saw Young taking punk by the horns (typically, he was alone among his peers in understanding the need for such a step) but remained essentially an extension of Neil Young the rogue rocker,"Trans" taps, into a new vocabulary.
It features his traditional strengths too an instinctive way with a melody, his love of the sheer thrill of brute force and loud guitars but then leaps headlong into the arms of the labour saving devices of the computer age. The result isn't so much technopop as techno-hard rock.
Not all of it though. Young's forays into the toyshop of drum machines, synths and vocoders are bracketed by straightforward songs in his classic style. Side one blasts off with the raucous "Little Thing Called Love" a boozy country rocker spearheaded by blazing slide guitar. With wicked impertinance, Young juggles with effortless chord sequences and flawless vocal harmonies.
"Hold On To Your Love" is smoother,using simple piano and steel guitar to construct a pop, song so seductive you have to laugh. Palpable hit single material.
Moving on to Silicon Valley, Young has graded his microchip workouts with considerable cunning. "Computer Cowboy" is basically a heavy guitar riff plus synths and vocoder. The ancient Buffalo Springfield song "Mr Soul' has been converted into a stomping juggernaut of twisted metal and protesting circuitry.
More explicit are "Sample And Hold" and the haunting "Transformer Man", both custom-built for and by the new tech."Sample And Hold" is a solitary saga of love between man and mechanism, a soundtrack for "Blade Runner".
Young, unrecognisably vocodered, plays the lonely citizen ordering his new android partner "I need a unit to sample and hold / But not the lonely one a new design . . ." Sci-fi fantasy or apartment block fact. "Transformer Man" is a sweet and simple tune using none of Young's usual tools. Voices are all synthetic. no guitars, lyrics are hard to decipher, but it's as affecting and lucid a song as Young has written. It's no coincidence, presumably, that the melody resembles a reworking of Kreftwerk's "Computer World".
The song also bears out some remarks Young made in an interview in an American paper a couple of months back, where he appalled his Woodstock generation interviewer by disowning most of his early- Seventies hippie output and asserting that he felt as comfortable with a roomful of electronic gadgets as he ever did with an acoustic guitar."We are in control," he sings elsewhere on "Trans". Young has shed another skin.
The remaining tracks do little more than demonstrate how far he's travelled. "Like An Inca" closes the album, and it's a half-hearted attempt at the sort of long resonant epic Young used to perfect occasionally. Still, its theme of nature being sterilised by man's infinite capacity for amassing destructive potential suits "Trans" well enough."If You Got Love" is mere throwaway.
So as '83 kicks off, the Loner slips through another dimension, grasps the new age of leisure technology with a child's wonder, then holds science's mirror up to nature with the knowing eyes of a veteran.
Like all Young's best records, "Trans" is alive with the strain of transition / transmission and the heady rush of dawning recognition.
That doesn't mean its perfect or complete. It just means
it's the year's first milestone.
ADAM SWEETING
(SOUNDS 83) NEIL YOUNG TRANS
AS A Neil Young admirer of more than ten years standing, the release of a new LP by the man ought to be the signal for unrestrained joy, but perhaps the series of gigs at Wembley last autumn should have prepared all Young fans for something a little out Of the ordinary. But this?
Neil, as his Wembley shows indicated, has discovered, and come to know and love, a vocoder which, for the uninitiated, mutates the human voice to a large extent in a manner which either pleases or annoys the listener, it's not easy to sit on the (electronic) fence about it, and as a great admirer of the guitar in general, and Neil Young's gritty playing in particular, the predominant vocoder taking the focus away from his guitar is a source of irritation. Maybe it wouldn't matter so much if the songs were better, as Neil Young has been responsible for numerous classics since the great days of the Buffalo Springfield in the '60s, and in fact one of those Springfield epics, 'Mr Soul', makes a reappearance here, but is vocoded almost out of existence.
Of the nine songs on the record, six are subjected to the gadgetry, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to assess their worth as plain songs, while of the unsullied remaining three, only 'Like An Inca', the last track on the LP, seems to make a lasting impression, and even then it seems inferior (so far) to the majestic 'Like A Hurricane'. It's easy to see why one of the other 'normal' tracks,'Little Thing Called Love', has been chosen as the concurrent single, because it seems much more like the old-style Neil ...
The half dozen vocoded pieces vary from those with interesting lyrical ideas (the Lone Ranger imagery of'Computer Cowbdy' and the 'Star Trek meets Frankenstein' of 'Sample and Hold') to the Devoesque 'We're In Control', which goes for the obvious world takeover by computers, but ultimately, devices like vocoders, while providing a novel sound, are little more than gimmicks, and ought to be recognised as such by a talent like Neil Young. The album will already be in the collection of the many diehard fans, but it's unfortunately unlikely to convert any new collectors to the cause. If you don't own anything by Neil, pass this by and go back to 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere' or 'Zuma'.
JOHN TOBLER
But the Crazy Horse romance has been impossible to shrug off, even as Young blundered through the '80s with a new half-arsed musical genre for every year.
And it's a romance that supersedes in many fans minds the brilliant 1989 Neil Young "comeback" album, 'Freedom', and the harrowing, moving solo gig he did at London's Hammersmith Odeon last December. It's a romance based in mythology, legend, rowdy bars and marathon alcohol stints; of guitarists as sparring patners; of long, slow songs lasting so long they'd cover one side of an album if they were ever recorded.
"Ragged Glory" is here to tell you some rather important news. It's everything you waited for. It's long, slow, jagged, raucous, criss-cross, nasty, vicious, emotional, snake-eyed. funny. demonic and very, very cool. It's got ten songs, some vintage guitar tussles, and the performances of Neil Young and Frank Sampedro (guitar), Billy Talbot (bass) and Ralph Molina (drums) are outrageously good throughout. It was recorded in next to no time, and it sounds like it.
'Country Home' cranks it open, a mid-pacer of leisurely and delicious structure rendered wholly vertebrate by a couple of remarkably twisted Young lead breaks, the first of many on the album. Part of the appeal of NY with Crazy Horse is that no time is the wrong time for a really violent guitar solo, and on 'Ragged Glory' you just better believe you can't move for solos.
After the up-tempo, spanking "White Line', it's time for a stupendous, almost unbelievably brutal epic called 'Fuckin' Up', a howl of frustration not unlike a slowed-down. less articulate 'Heavy Love' (from the ultra-limited'89 mini-album 'Eldorado'). Young, finding himself solo-ed into a corner at the end by virtue of his sheer detonatory pitch-defying digital rage, finds stunning and satisfying release in no less than 45 seconds of feedback at the song's demise.
'Over And Over' is a slightly shorter tune. but one that packs a peach of a chorus and gives a perfect indication of how well the rhythm section of Talbot and Molina read each other.
Next up - and this is when you know its a classic - is 'Love To Burn', a song that will quite simply murder all other Neil Young material in a live situation if played for long enough.It has a loping structure geared for endless angry guitar sorties (Young obliges here with three masterful examples) and a deceptively sleepy demeanour. None of Young's guitar playing here can be located in any manual, but that's their problem, not his.
Side two's opener is a one-off cover version of 'Farmer John', a US hit in the '60s for The Premiers. A crafty variation on the excuse-me-sir-but-l-wanna-marry-your-daughter theme, it sounds like some tuning-up rehearsal fun magnified tenfold and then put through amplifiers the size of lighthouses. That this song, the album's throwaway smile raiser, chucks 90 per cent of other band's original songs out of the window is one more salient point in a whole slobbering list of recommendations.
It keeps going, "Mansion On The Hill" solid, functional; 'Days That Used To Be', a halcyon grinder; side two's epic potboiler 'Love And Only Love'...before the final, semi-live 'Mother Earth' a Young lyric set to a traditioial American tune - which rendered the Wembley audience at the Mandela gig speechless and could well do likewise to Young's international electorate when they hear this. Just the man, a heavily miked-up guitar and a strong grievance. Awesome. Like Jimi Hendrix doing "The Star Spangled Banner', only with a rage of a vocal as well.
It's a hell of a great listen, and it soon becomes clear even before side one's feedback banquet - that this album is up there with 'Everybody Know's This is Nowhere', 'Zuma', and side two of 'Rust Never Sleeps', and must be exulted as a stone classic immaculate Neil Young & Crazy Horse album. It is probably the best album Neil Young has ever made. He says he'll let us know on that one.
"Ragged Glory" for sure, His truth goes marching on. DAVID CAVANAGH.