I already passed preliminary comment on this album five weeks ago, where I grandly stated that I was waiting for the DVD-Audio version (despite not having a DVD-Audio player). My mum had other ideas, and gave me the CD for Christmas.
Straight off, there's a couple of things to be said in favour of Le Noise. One, it's not Fork in the Road. Two, at eight tracks and 38 minutes, it's not shapelessly long like just about every other album I can think of that Neil's released in the last 20 years. To be fair, more than 40 minutes of this din would begin to grate rather badly.
Further than that, and recognising it's still very early days, since I've only played the album about three times since getting it, I'm still sticking with my initial verdict of neither masterstroke nor turkey. It's not as off-the-wall brave as Greendale, not as sweeping in its scope as Sleeps with Angels — those being, in my book, probably the best two of those last 20 years. On the other hand, it has got some proper writing on it, unlike Fork….
Bearing in mind what I was quoting about Freedom the other day — giving fans a root/route to relate new material back to whatever they liked about me fifteen years — it's interesting how Neil let's his guard slip on Hitchhiker and starts singing Like and Inca from 1982. Anyone who's followed Neil at all closely knows of his tendency to plagiarise himself, a kind of recognition that he's only got so many musical ideas in him. In this case, it's like a palimpsest: the new song (which I seem to remember from Broken Arrow was actually written a decade or more ago) being unfurled in the groove left by the old. As Neil said in an interview in the NME in 1982 — still well within the first 20 years of his career — it's like he's a dinosaur eating his own tail.
Meanwhile, it's good to know that my mum's judgement is still better than mine: I really don't need that DVD-Audio version.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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