Most potently, there is the remorseless obscuring of an iconic, raw voice behind thick sheets of disguise (in this case, chaotic backing vocals and murky reverb) and this, intriguingly, is precisely the same offense that rendered Trans so immensely incomprehensible to so many. Here, the sparse folk backdrop of “Suzanne” or “Joan of Arc” is violently subverted by Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound production the music’s swampy texture seems almost to hint at the vulgar lyrical fantasies. (Though their sprawling abstractions alienated fans and critics alike, both works found eventual acclaim as landmark precursors to what would later became post-rock.)Īnd I think of Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man, perhaps the clearest parallel to Trans by simple virtue of its abrupt divergence from the stylistic trademarks of Cohen’s rich songbook. I think of Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and Slowdive’s Pygmalion, two of my personal favorite records, and two of the best records ever to end record contracts. I think of PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire?, with its uncompromisingly abrasive textures and twisted character sketches that made fans question the artist’s mental well being. Records that ruined careers, infuriated label heads, maybe found an audience a generation later, or maybe not at all. Image: that seems attractive to me (and it does), it may hint at a frequent personal gravitation towards the “weird” album in the discography - the one that doesn’t quite fit. How do you deal with a Neil Young album that refuses to behave like a Neil Young album?
I was struck more, I think, by the notion of a black-sheep album so warped beyond all recognition, so incontrovertibly screwed-up, as to preclude coherent reconciliation with the rest of a beloved songwriter’s storied catalogue. I know I found the LP cheap on Amazon (used, of course - the album has never been reissued, and the CD never released at all, in the US), and I know it was more than completist compulsion that drove me to Add To Cart. I can’t recall the precise chain of fascinations that led me to it. Did he sell it back to the store after one spin? God knows my father would have hated it, but still, the absence in his collection seemed puzzling: nearly everything else in Young’s vast discography was there and accounted for, dating back to the 1969 self-titled debut and including rarities like Time Fades Away (out-of-print since the ’70s, and never released on CD) and the Journey from the Past soundtrack, so why not Trans? I discovered Trans as a void, an empty space in my father’s record collection where the album may (or may not) once have sat. Neil Young, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography “They put me down for fuckin’ around with things that I didn’t understand-for getting involved in something that I shouldn’t have been involved in.
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