It’s Genius, I Swear – Mister Heavenly on Neil Young’s ‘Trans’
By: Nick Thorburn, Mister Heavenly
Neil Young's 1982 album, Trans, is probably one of my favourite records with the most inversely disproportionate critical revulsion.
14 albums deep, Neil Young wanted to switch it up. He was on the vanguard of digital recording (he bought one of the first digital recording systems, and was subsequently burned- just listen to 1986's Landing on Water), and was constantly trying to reinvent himself after he veered into the "middle of the road" (his words) with ‘Heart of Gold’.
10 years after that song and its mothership Harvest launched him into the mainstream, he was digging deep into the synthetic sounds made popular by Kraftwerk and re-manipulated by Afrika Bambaataa. He dug deep into the boogie, and purchased a vocoder which slathered over half of the album's nine cuts. It was the beginning of a fraught relationship* with his label Geffen, which reached a head with his following album Everybody's Rockin', an all-out rockabilly album with a cobbled together band called the Shocking Pinks.
But I digress! Trans kills. ‘Transformer Man’, ‘Sample & Hold’, ‘Computer Age’, ‘We R In Control’ - You put these songs on in a club, and you will get asses moving (depends on the club, actually). They still retain his quintessential sound, but instead of relying on the usual instrumentation, he employed his ragtag Crazy Horse compatriots with synths and drum machines. With a further nod to vintage Neil, he even remade Mr. Soul from his Buffalo Springfield days.
The cherry on top is the fact that the album, and specifically, the use of vocoder, was a love letter to his young son who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. By blurring the sound of his voice, he was able to express the difficulties he had in communicating with his son. Unfortunately, he was also unable to communicate to the critics, his audience, and his record label just how good this record is.
*They sued Neil for not sounding enough like Neil Young™!
- Mister Heavenly release their debut album Out Of Love on Sub Pop records on August 16th. Preview it below.
Artists in this article: Mister Heavenly, Neil Young