What the fuck is this? On 1983’s Trans, Neil Young, who kept it so real on Tonight’s the Night it was hard to bear, decided to become a machine—less painful feelings that way. Or at least that’s one way of looking at it. Many of the songs on the LP utilize the vocoder and synclavier and hurt me just to listen to them, but it’s not the emotions they express I find so painful—they hurt me because they suck. Neil joined the computer age and didn’t go half way—Young has never gone half way in his life.
No, Young utilized all the latest synthpop technology available in 1983 to produce a futuristic album that left his folk-rock base scratching their heads. Hell, even the songs that don’t go all the way with gadgetry (i.e., “Like an Inca,” “Little Thing Called Love,” and “Hold on to Your Love”) don’t sound like Neil Young songs. Maybe it’s me; strip away the synthpop drumbeats, vocoder-altered vocals, and general early ’80s feel of these songs, and some, if not most, of them are good. It’s just I can’t get beyond the technological trappings of such songs as the bouncy “We R in Control,” the “this could be Ultravox” “Computer Age,” and the folkie gone techno mad “Transformer Man.” Crazy Horse guitarist Poncho Sampedro put it best when he said of the sessions, which started out normally enough, “Next thing we knew, Neil stripped all our music off, overdubbed all this stuff, the vocoder, weird sequencing, and put the synth shit on it.”
Opener “Little Thing Called Love” is “synth shit” free and bops along wonderfully; the chorus is great, the guitar and backing vocals ditto. The same goes for “Hold On to Your Love,” a very pretty and all-too catchy Young number of the folk-rock school. Then there’s the long one, “Like an Inca,” which sounds like a Steely Dan song to me. The melody, the pacing, the guitar sound—they’ve all got Becker and Fagen written all over them. Still, it’s the album’s highlight, even if Neil does seem to confuse his Incans with his Aztecs; oh well, nobody ever turned to Young for a degree in history.
As for the other six tunes—one of which is a transmogrified take on the classic “Mr. Soul” that comes at you like a deranged robot, although the guitar part is both human and nasty—I can only say Young has every right to experiment, and that we have every right to say, “What?” “Sample and Hold” is a particularly egregious example of Young’s experimental proclivities at their worst, and reminds me of Styx’s immortally awful “Mr. Roboto.” It’s a dance track of sorts, but you won’t catch me dancing to it, just as you won’t catch me listening to “Computer Age” (a representative product of a horrible period in music), “Transformer Man” (an example of vocoder abuse at its worst), “We R in Control” (INXS fronted by a cyborg), or “Computer Cowboy” (which despite the vocoder is the most listenable tune of the bunch, thanks to its excellent melody and big bad guitar riff).
What else is there to say? I’ll add “Like an Inca” to my mix tape of Steely Dan’s greatest hits and move on. It’s debatable as to which LP is worse, Trans or the same year’s Everybody’s Rockin’, but I will say that David Geffen’s much-mocked lawsuit against Young on the grounds that Neil Young wasn’t releasing Neil Young music makes perfect sense to me. If I’d been handed these tapes by the guy who gave us Tonight’s the Night and Rust Never Sleeps, I’d have been peeved too. Which is not to say Young shouldn’t be admired for doing exactly what he wants to do; it’s the hallmark of his genius, and the reason why he still matters when virtually none of his contemporaries do. It’s just that some experiments work better than others, and in my humble opinion, this one should have never made it out of the laboratory.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C-
