Neil Young
Le Noise

Le Noise should be listened to at night when darkness takes over your sight and you remain solitary with your doubts and thoughts. The lights of the houses turn off one by one, leaving the moon to guide the way for the lone wanderers left on the streets. When the actions of the day are already tucked away in the drawer of the past, and you reckon with those of the future. Alone, like this album that emanates a particular charm was recorded.

This time Young hit the mark, after the disappointment of albums like the latest Fork in the road released just a year ago, instinctive yes, as in his classic way of operating but somehow poor compared to the Canadian’s past, it took the hand of a renowned producer like Daniel Lanois to once again give a twist to Young's career. This will be an album that will be remembered on par with his best works. Young and Lanois managed to create something that the great Canadian had never released during his forty-year career. A symbiosis that worked.

Young has always experimented, questioning his career each time but always following his own instincts, albums recorded and never released in the seventies, the criticized and bizarre albums of the early eighties like Re-ac-tor and Trans to albums of pure experimentation and noise like Arc or the soundtrack of Dead man.
Neil Young alone and his guitar, both acoustic and electric. All the ingredients on which Lanois worked are here.
Recorded in the producer's house, this is a guitar-centric album one hundred percent, everything you hear was produced by Young's guitar, reverberations, low notes, noises, and effects that build songs on which Young's lyrics stand out. Songs mostly born acoustic and transformed into electric, an experiment that yielded good results. Love and the awareness of not being able to age without the loved one, after a life in which many friends are no more in "Walk with me." This is an album where Young lays his life bare, his love for his companion Pegi, by his side for thirty years, the evasion of old age (an issue dragging since his youth) and the specter of death that, as happened in the past, took many friends from him, most recently his faithful bandmate Ben Keith, the anger toward the world in "It’s an angry world" where the guitar is sharp and stands out clear and strong in the void, just like in "Sign of Love" and "Someone's going to rescue you."

Night and chills, listening to "Peaceful Valley Boulevard," almost a prayer hoping someone notices what is happening on earth or the acoustic "Love and war," where Young realizes he spent a life singing of love and war while people continue, willingly or not, to pray perpetually for love and war.
Then Young pulls out of the drawers a small autobiographical piece in music that stops in 1975, the year "The Hitchhiker" was composed. Electric guitar, affected voice, and echoes, a small masterpiece among confessions of paranoia and drugs. It all concludes with "Rumblin'," touching metaphoric words amid earth’s quakes and love.
The eight songs of Le Noise will be accompanied by as many black and white and evocative videos, directed by director Adam Vollick that seem to best represent the songs in images. Once again, Young seems to point a way, achieving the maximum with a minimalist style and an artistic conception and inspiration that leads him to put his ideas into music each time, often facing criticism that I am sure will not come this time. Take it or leave it.