Neil Young's TRANS: An Underrated Masterpiece, or Justly Ignored?

I guess reactor is a better consistent rocker, but i wish he'd kept those synth bass noises onboard as part of his rock music sound, sounds that he used sparingly and appropriately (cf: typical synth-only music)

perhaps i should check out "Weight of the World", even if landing on water seemed very light-weight when i heard that (again years ago)

the heavy synth really adds something to the rock sound i think when as here it's added to the conventional rock'n'roll arsenal and not merely substituted for good bass playing (since said substitution often seems to translate to bad bass-paying, emulation)

please someone recommend some rock music that does that (ie real rythym section of bass and drums (not drum and bass machines) plus synth oomph)

I'd say try some Chrome and mid-period Six Finger Satellite (Severe Exposure especially).

I like Little Thing Called Love, like a faster, happier version of 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart':

Only love puts a tear in your eye
Only love makes you hypnotiyized
Only love makes you choose
Only love brings you...the bloooz.

Charming in many ways, especially from a 20 years-after-the-fact hindsight view (the same way it's entertaining to watch Clockwork Orange and think about its view of what those in the early Seventies thought the future [which is today] would look like).

Listening for the first time - this is a very timely album.

this album's great! kinda marred by the inclusion of the non-synth/electro stuff though. so unnecessary.

but I adore "Like an Inca" though. I've listened to it more often than "Cortez the Killer," I think.

(I guess that one's non-synth besides the two-note synth motif in the chorus)

It is Neil Young's best album.
^^^^belongs in the challops hall of fame ... not even in Neil Young's top ten best albums, though you could make a case for it being the best of the 80s, maybe. it is pretty fascinating overall -- is there an example of another major 60s rock artist trying something so weirdly daring in the 80s?

i fixed a facebook quiz so that i could get this as my 'what neil young album are you'

Is Human Highway ever going to get rereleased? If they put it on BlueRay, that would be the thing pushing me into buying a player.

i don't know about a re-release, but if you just need a copy you can e-mail me @ dr.carl.sagan at gmail

You kick ass.

haha, enjoy ....

or rather, "enjoy"

just remembered that the non-LP single version of Mr Soul was better than the one on Trans. Never checked to see if it was available. I remember it as being a denser/louder sound. Anyone know if it's out there as MP3, bonus track .. ( I could search, I guess.)

I've seen Human Highway before & I totally enjoyed it.

Underrated half-assterpiece. The half that's good is my favorite Neil Young I've ever heard.

Trans is so fucking good. Especially loud.

harmonies on Sample & Hold are godlike.

yeah, seriously, "sample and hold" owns. juiced up severed heads with sweet harmonies or a kinder gentler skinny puppy

Rated #20 (out of 35) in this piece of click bait. FWIW I like Trans a lot; would certainly make the bottom half of my top 10 Neil records.

http://www.stereogum.com/1445091/neil-young-albums-from-worst-to-best/franchises/counting-down/attachment/trans/

Listening to this in full for the first time (on slightly hissy O.G. VINYL that I've actually had for a long time) after dipping into Shakey again, and being intrigued by the perverse idea of Neil using the Synclavier to do note for note replacements of Crazy Horse backing tracks. The non-electro songs would've been at quite at home on a mythical early 80s CSNY album (or Daylight Again, if S & N went to Y instead of ringers and the then at death's door C).

I wonder how pissed Geffen got when he heard ZZ Top's Eliminator, which dropped a few months after Trans and used electronics in similar ways, and realized how horribly right this project could have gone.

I'd call it Unjustly Not Ignored. But I know it has lots of defenders.

After I got done with Trans, I put on a vinyl copy of The Bridge tribute (which I think scored in the same haul about 7 years ago). The Sonic Youth "Computer Age" was nice, but I get the feeling they could've picked anything from the Young catalogue and it would have come sounded exactly the same as that cover.

In case anyone cares, a whole raft of recordings from the Solo Trans tour have just been upped on D1mead0zen.

He wasn't terrible in the 1980's.

he's reissuing Eldorado!

no fan need own this travesty, in which Young and the International Harvesters treat country like Sid Vicious did “My Way.”

Lol, nice.

haha yeah, for my money his worst album

the unplugged cast-off recording of "sample and hold" is well worth finding. "hold on to your love" is one of those great, lyrically simple songs of his that i would hope older takes exist.

trans

i buy used copies of this vinyl on the cheap whenever I see it with the intention of handing them out to bring new members into the blessed Trans fold.

Well. I wish I was an Aztec,
Or a runner in Peru
I would build such
beautiful buildings
To house the chosen few
Like an Inca from Peru.

I read about "Razor Love" in Shakey, but I couldn't find the original

yeah I don't think it's ever surfaced, tyler would know for sure but i've never seen anything

assuming if you got love went all the way through mastering if it was listed on the cover art

I kind of prefer the shorter version of "Sample and Hold" to the 8-minute CD version, would be good to have both easily available.

I first knew sample and hold and transformer man via the lucky thirteen comp

me too! that was a cool comp back in the day esp when that era was largely unknown (to me at least)

it's amazing that the catchy, accessible, occasionally moving (now unintentionally retrofurist) electronic stuff is what people took issue with on this album considering how dire the more traditional stuff is (the first track, my god). if had been all synth based it would be great rather than pretty good

Been saying the same for years. As I understand it, the electronic stuff was recorded first but I don't think there was enough of it for an entire album.

... typographic mistake. The album is actually called TRAINS

i don't think the trad stuff is that bad, but it's obvious the real meat of the album is the trans-ass trans tracks

Like An Inca is great, the rest of the non-electronic tracks not so much

we know you'll be satisfied
when you energize

As stated, the opening track is terrible.

"Hold On to Your Love" is nice though, if a bit wet.

because i love thematically messy albums, i have to say that —while i love trans quite a lot and consider it one of the last hurrahs of truly classic neil— it could be improved by adding 'wanderin' from everybody's rockin' because why the hell not.

the wiki for trans says "After a year of work, the album was mixed in a hurry because Young was eager to go out on tour (documented in the home video Neil Young in Berlin), and a last-minute change in the running order is evident in the inclusion of a song called "If You Got Love" in the track listing and lyric sheet, even though it is not on the album.[3] Portions of several tracks appeared in Young's 1982 feature-length comedy film Human Highway.[11]"

i've never seen human highway, so i'm not sure if this means that portions of songs that were ON trans were featured in human highway or if some of the cut songs were?

I had that Berlin vhs, it’s great - don’t know what happened to it ☹️

Nils Lofgren is wonderfully hamming it up in that Berlin performance iirc

that i know is supposed to be re-released

I rented it from Netflix in the mid '00s.

ha me too. nils' interpretive dancing is unforgettable

I had that Berlin vhs, it’s great - don’t know what happened to it ☹️

Ditto!

if you got love has been bootlegged for ages — kind of a Santana groove meets "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong" haha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2xasVHiL6s

The synth "Razor Love" has never shown up as far as I know.

I'm pretty sure the Human Highway film doesn't contain any unreleased Neil songs.

i find this a middling album because it's not cohesive for the reasons as noted by a bunch of people above. although i actually don't mind "a little thing call love" and I love "hold on to your love"

Didn't Human Highway have the Devo/Neil synth version of Hey Hey My My?

I'd consider that a Devo cover with Neil guesting, not an unreleased song?