Before and After Science

by Adam Sweeting

It has been pointed out that in the end we are all alone. The great thing about Neil Young is that he recognised the fact from the start, and he's been living with it cheerfully for the best part of 20 years. Trans has been in the pipeline for some time (nothing new for Neil). This time it was worth the wait, because Trans is a major Nail Young record, not something like re-ac-tor which he releases to plug gaps in the calendar.

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.