Neil Young: Le Noise Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.5

Neil Young: Le Noise Blu-ray Movie Review

Neil Young and Daniel Lanois make some startling music together.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 20, 2010

Somewhere along the line Neil Young got pegged as the “problem child” of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and his supposedly prickly temperament sometimes overshadowed his musical accomplishments. Young has had a long and splendidly successful career, and if encroaching age has perhaps—perhaps—mellowed his attitude, at least somewhat, it certainly hasn’t put the damper on his musical outbursts, as Le Noise amply demonstrates. This amazing new Blu-ray offers a really palpable set of tunes from Young, with an almost assaultive barrage from an assortment of Young's guitars, including his Gretsch White Falcon and his iconic Les Paul, as well as a really interesting sounding electro-acoustic instrument fashioned by producer Daniel Lanois himself. From the first virtually violent mass chords that erupt from Young’s fingers, you know that this is not going to be any quasi-folkie trip down a “Heart of Gold” memory lane. Lanois and Young may indeed seem like strange bed- and/or song-fellows, but Young’s brutal approach to a lot of this material blends surprisingly well with Lanois’ production emphasis on loops, distortion and other studio wizardry. When you mix it all up with some weird but often very evocative black and white cinematography, this Blu-ray plays like a sort of art house version of MTV. It’s just Neil and his guitar, the production finesse of Lanois, accompanied by some strange but strangely wonderful imagery, and it makes Le Noise one of the more arresting releases that blends hi-res audio (albeit only in stereo) with hi-def imagery (albeit almost exclusively in black and white, with a lot of post-processing).

Young’s plaintive voice has aged particularly well, and what was once a screech has mellowed somewhat into an anguished and often despairing cry of, well, old (or at least older) age. Musically this set of eight tunes is assured and at times rather combative, as if Young wants to prove he still has his mojo (to co-opt a word from another recent Blu-ray audio release). Lyrically, Young wants to be a philosopher-poet, and he sometimes succeeds. As in the case with a lot of rock artists, sometimes his reach exceeds his grasp, but there is a uniform excellence of craft in these songs, and only an occasional gaffe, as in the opening of “Love and War,” where Young admits, “When I sing about love and war, I don’t really know what I’m saying.” All-righty then.

Lanois has cut a particularly high profile in the often capricious world of rock music over the last several decades, producing a host of iconic albums for such artists as U2, Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno. The variety hinted at in that list really only provides a passing glimpse into Lanois’ ability to meld his producing vision with a hugely disparate group of writers and performers. Young’s “back to basics” minimalism might seem like a certain kind of dead end for Lanois, but instead the two have managed to craft a compelling and extremely dynamic sonic tour through a sort of souped up folk-rock vocabulary that allows Young to stretch out more than he probably ever has before.

Filmmaker Adam CK Vollick describes himself as a “visual machinist,” one who crafts unorthodox images. Here, we get a lot of shots of Lanois’ Silverlake, California mansion, where Young and Lanois recorded Le Noise, mixed with a variety of other imagery, including shots from outer space provided courtesy of NASA. Vollick creates a kaleidoscope—albeit almost entirely in black and white—of extraordinary images and images within images that keep the visual language as arresting as the sonic side of things is. Within a framed cupola, Young’s scowling face appears. Across a ceiling, scores of mystical clouds float by. It’s a quasi-hallucinogenic experience, and in fact becomes a bit more than merely quasi in the brief color elements which erupt toward the end of the 38 minute program in snippets that seem to evoke that final “ultimate trip” from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But it’s the music after all that must either carry this Blu-ray release, or leave it in the dust of remainder budget bins, and in this instance, Le Noise admirably expands Young’s accomplishments while not straying so far from the artist’s stock in trade that longtime fans will be put off by the experimentation. This is easily some of Young’s most facile guitar playing, and it shows off the legend in an extremely flattering light. The folk-pop movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s may have in fact pigeonholed Young too much for his own liking (could that have been the cause of the rampant “temperament” reportage that followed him around in those days?). Now with decades of recordings bolstering his reputation, he’s free to cut loose a little, and Le Noise is like a breath of restless fresh air, sometimes abrasive, sometimes soothing, but something that must be taken in whole with no trepidation.

Le Noise's setlist consists of:

Walk With Me
Sign of Love
Someone's Gonna Rescue You
Love and War
Angry World
Hitchhiker
Peaceful Valley Boulevard
Rumblin'

Neil Young: Le Noise Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Le Noise arrives on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p image in 1.78:1. This is a heavily post-processed set of music videos and as such a number of factors need to be taken into consideration. First of all, almost all of this Blu-ray is in black and white. More importantly, filmmaker Vollick treats the basic image as a painter would a canvas, speckling it with overblown contrast, abundant grain, flashes of light which obliterate large sections of the frame, and a variety of other editing and special effects techniques that at times are almost reminiscent of the early surrealist work of Bunuel and Dali (and, no, I'm not kidding). It's therefore a little misleading to talk about sharpness, contrast, black levels and the like as we usually do in our video critiques. Le Noise is almost like a live action painting a lot of the time, and if you come to it with that point of view, the image here is often glorious. It's soft, to be sure, but that is obviously exactly what Vollick was going for. Black levels can be unbelievably deep and rich when contrast hasn't been artifically amped up or desaturated. In fact the overblown contrast may be the one element that may bother some videophiles, as it leaves the image glowing, depriving even close-ups of fine detail at times. However, if you're in an adventurous mood, I think you'll find Le Noise's image quality outstanding if taken on its own very idiosyncratic terms.

Neil Young: Le Noise Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Audiophiles may initially be up in arms that there's no surround track on Le Noise, but they need to remember that, in Lanois' own words, the recording is just "a man on a stool," i.e., Young playing his guitar. There really isn't that much opportunity to exploit surround channels, although I must admit that on a couple of tunes that have a lot of Lanois' trademark processed sound to them, I did wonder what some nice phasing between channels might have sounded like. All of this said, the Blu-ray has a perfectly splendid lossless LPCM 2.0 mix (192kHz/24 bit) which is about as full bodied a stereo soundfield as you're likely to experience on a musically oriented Blu-ray. This is all the more impressive in that it is indeed just Young and his guitar, accompanied of course by the production wizardry of Lanois. This is a bristling and palpable track, that fills all frequencies brilliantly. There's a lot of distortion in the guitar and production work here, but the good news is it's ironically presented very clearly on the LPCM track, by which I mean, the distortion sounds exactly as it should—distorted. Young's voice does get buried a time or two under the waves of guitar sounds, but overall the balance between vocals and instrumental accompaniment is top notch.

Neil Young: Le Noise Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray.

Neil Young: Le Noise Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's short (at 38 minutes), and certainly not always sweet, but Le Noise is a really fascinating project from Young and Lanois and it should certainly appeal to the legions of Young fans. Those who like experimental videos might also cotton to the really interesting look of this piece, certainly one of the more innovative sets of music videos to come down the pike in quite a while. Highly recommended.