Synth tones infiltrate the Neil Young recording camp. The result is Trans, a project which should not work. Young brings about a bait and switch of material here. Where his 1983 effort may begin with the familiar, rocking tones which had sparked the best parts of his Reprise Records days, his debut on the Geffen Records label has a faux sense of security. Something sounds somewhat off with opener Little Thing Called Love. “Synth shit” is what Crazy Horse guitarist Frank Sampedro would call Trans, the album he and the rest of the backing instrumentalists worked on before Young replaced their work. He has a right to be enraged, though Young was keen to push his sound into the future, as many artists of the time were. Bob Dylan tried and failed with the pudgy work on Empire Burlesque while chart-chaser Paul McCartney paired up with everyone from Michael Jackson to Stevie Wonder. Survival of the coolest is what Young had on his mind.
Informed by changes in his personal life, starting a family and feeling the refreshing taste of a million dollars per album, Young finds himself trading his quality in for quick pops at the future. He is the man who was trying to get his head around the computer age. Few did it well. Trans highlights how much Young wanted to maintain his image as a relevant recording artist. How much he would sacrifice could not have been expected. He throws Crazy Horse under the bus, trading them off for the relatively tame and same-sounding instrumentals which affect Computer Age. Aptly titled, as it does sound as though a computer ripped through his vocal work, his personable notes of the world around him lost to an obsession with drumbeats and synthesisers. The trouble is, Young does not follow the line of interest that a creative like Giorgio Moroder follows. He is not accessing the history of new instruments but, like Elton John with the doomed Victim of Love release, trying to incorporate them into his unchanged genre style.
Young decides the first to go will be the band that has backed his best works. The next part to be thrown out is his uniqueness as an artist. Young makes music here that anyone with Garage Band now could, and that is a shock to the system considering his roaring, near-perfect form for a decade before the 1980s. Credit to Young for embracing the future, but it sounds bleak. Databanks here, hackers there, it is very much the “influenced by Jeff Bridges’ Tron” style of creating. A fundamental contradiction roars through this release. A desire to blur the nature and vibrancy of country clashes with the sleek and metallic machinery, now more than ever as we struggle to break from the always-online world. A connection between using technology to communicate with his son, Ben, and the writing found on Trans feels tangible at best.
Earnest reasons for its creation do not excuse the underwhelming mix, which Young said at the time was a tad poor. Transformer Man is a light affair with no real presence, but the same goes for most of the songs assembled here. Hold On To Your Love feels like middling inevitabilities, music written with no heart to it. It may feel a tinge ironic that the moments without the artificial voice are as generic as the robotics heard elsewhere, but such is the case for the machine-laden Trans. We must applaud Young, irrespective, for trying something new. He has as genuine an intent in following this future-laden tech noise as any, though his assimilation into the genre, rather than his perspective and tone leading the charge of new sound, is a telling slip-up from the musician, who enters a period of varyingly poor releases. Still, give Sample and Hold a listen. Young walked so Daft Punk could run laps around him.
