Hello cowgirl in the sand
Spurred on by a bit of backhanded prose over at the latest entry at Jeff Worrell's excellent Ka`lei´do`phon CD a day project/blog, I've been listening to Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It's easily one of the best studio albums Young's ever managed to produce (although Tonight's The Night and a few others rival it, and I like the live Time Fades Away more) and I loved it just as much this time as I normally do, but I was struck at how different the extended guitar parts on the two epic tracks are from what you might expect.
Especially "Down By The River", where a dead simple drum beat and an easy up-and-down bass part slowly keep pace for Danny Whitten and Young to scrawl out a series of increasingly small scale and intricate guitar licks. I'm used to thinking of these sections as more conventionally (for some value of "conventionally") rockin', probably from hearing live versions on things like Weld (except, after checking it, neither song is on Weld, so I'm not sure if I'm just thinking of that kind of sound or if I've heard these songs in a different context somewhere else). Rather than thick, blustery distortion the sound is lean and almost wiry, vicious guitar jabs curling into certain productively blind alleys and then hitting the same note over and over again.
They sound great, sure, but what surprises me listening to them again now is how much more like say, Marquee Moon or even some of the songs on early Talking Heads albums these sound like. I'm not sure how much of this is a product of Young and David Briggs' production or the remastering on the bog standard edition of EKTIN I own. Both songs have passages of billowing distortion closer to how I think of them when I'm not actually listening to the record, but there are long stretches where the sound is enticingly clean and thin and almost mean. If a good remaster would take that element out, I'm not sure I need one.
The songs themselves are great, of course - the part where the band roars back in with the chorus on "Down By The River" after Neil and Whitten have been fucking around in the wilderness for five minutes always gives me chills.
Especially "Down By The River", where a dead simple drum beat and an easy up-and-down bass part slowly keep pace for Danny Whitten and Young to scrawl out a series of increasingly small scale and intricate guitar licks. I'm used to thinking of these sections as more conventionally (for some value of "conventionally") rockin', probably from hearing live versions on things like Weld (except, after checking it, neither song is on Weld, so I'm not sure if I'm just thinking of that kind of sound or if I've heard these songs in a different context somewhere else). Rather than thick, blustery distortion the sound is lean and almost wiry, vicious guitar jabs curling into certain productively blind alleys and then hitting the same note over and over again.
They sound great, sure, but what surprises me listening to them again now is how much more like say, Marquee Moon or even some of the songs on early Talking Heads albums these sound like. I'm not sure how much of this is a product of Young and David Briggs' production or the remastering on the bog standard edition of EKTIN I own. Both songs have passages of billowing distortion closer to how I think of them when I'm not actually listening to the record, but there are long stretches where the sound is enticingly clean and thin and almost mean. If a good remaster would take that element out, I'm not sure I need one.
The songs themselves are great, of course - the part where the band roars back in with the chorus on "Down By The River" after Neil and Whitten have been fucking around in the wilderness for five minutes always gives me chills.
And those whoozy overlooked ballads, which sound like guys smoking some fuckin' high-grade pot, have never been battered (except by "Ambulance Blues" on On The Beacn, perhaps).
Posted by
Alfred Soto |
10:21 PM
Good call on "Ambulance Blues", although I almost prefer "Vampire Blues" just for the cheese of it.
One of my favourite musical jokes of all time is in "The Losing End (When You're On)", where Neil screeches out "All right, Wilson - pick it!"
Posted by
Ian |
11:40 PM