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Album Review
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Star Tribune, Album Review >>
CD reviews
A look at Neil Young and King Sunny Ade
Last update: October 4, 2010 - 2:21 PM
POP/ROCK
Neil Young, "Le Noise" (Reprise)
Young is an experimental artist working in a pop mode; he wants his music to be relevant, but he doesn't care about either proving himself great or staying hip, the usual stumbling blocks for aging baby-boomer rock stars. Young just wants to hear how something (a choir, an R&B band, a concept like the history of automobiles) sounds when it collides with his fundamental warped-folk sound. A strong sense of entitlement, the bane of many in his generation, is his ace in the hole. Not caring what anybody thinks keeps him attuned to himself.
He does make room for collaborators, though, and on "Le Noise," his 34th solo studio album, he engages in a clarifying dialogue. Young recorded the tracks in the home of producer Daniel Lanois, using just his voice and mostly electric guitar; the studio master then remixed and enhanced them. The result lands in the same ballpark as work by younger artists such as Joseph Arthur or even Best Coast, though the mood is more reflective.
At times, the sound heats up, as on the earnest "Walk With Me" and the Bo Diddley-touched "Rumblin'." But in general, this is an easy album to enjoy, something not always true of Young's recent output. "Le Noise" is not an epic -- if it were a book, you could read it in an afternoon -- but it's statement enough from a man who's already said so much.
ANN POWERS, LOS ANGELES TIMES
WORLD
King Sunny Ade, "Baba Mo Tunde" (Mesa/Bluemoon)
Good news: The longest track on this new double-disc album runs past 31 minutes. The new, 16-piece version of Ade's African Beats band recorded it recently in a Pennsylvania studio, with six chorus singers behind Ade's soft lead vocals, two players of the talking drum and the marvelous trap-set drummer Taiwo Sogo Ogunjimi-Oba. (The pedal-steel guitar, long an exotic mark in his band, is gone.) 10/04/10 >> go there
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