Day 26: Neil Young – Harvest

This album was ubiquitous to me before I even put it on for the first time this morning. As has happened a few times so far, I had the fun “Oh, this song and this song were from this album?” experience as I ran through Heart of Gold, Old Man, and The Needle And The Damage Done. I remember those songs as tepid radio noise, songs I’d heard filtered through FM decay too many times to take seriously.

So when I fired this up and “Out On The Weekend” came through my earphones, I discovered that the notes I had heard played in those aforementioned hits when they appeared on the radio were only peaks jutting from a murky surface. “Out On The Weekend” deftly uses space as an instrument, thrusting you into a cavernous sound stage where the bass and drums are the only concrete sounds. Instruments are placed very delicately: Neil’s voice, a soulful harmonica, a restless acoustic guitar, and dizzyingly dissonant peals of pedal-steel guitar cry, kept discrete enough to keep from muddling together. You are put into the room with him, especially when you hear what sounds like his harmonica scraping against the microphone (around the 2:00 mark). It’s a killer opener, as it establishes a trusting intimacy that is maintained through the album. Young’s voice has a way of sounding forced but better for it, as if he knows he can’t vibrato as well as he wants to but knows the song needs it, and the opener’s sleeve-hearted lyrics seem to get lost somewhere between the banalities on the page (“See the lonely boy, out on the weekend/Trying to make it pay./Can’t relate to joy, he tries to speak and/Can’t begin to say”) and the sounds he emits. I could’ve actually just listened to this song all day.

The album keeps it up, running through styles in pairs of tracks. The most contentious numbers, “A Man Needs A Maid” and “There’s A World”, are constantly maligned for the inclusion of the London Symphony Orchestra. On the former, Young tries to scale a certain height with his voice, sounding low in the mix the whole time, fighting to be heard, but by the end of the song when the orchestral accompaniment is crashing down, he tries to sing against it and is drowned out. This is largely due to mastering limitations at the time: to make Young properly audible during the very loud section of the song, the volume of his voice would have to be cranked to uncomfortable levels. However, that this was not fixed on the remaster reflects on an important effect this imbalance contributed to the song. When Young cryptically confronts the difficulty of letting a woman into his life (the actress mentioned in the lyrics, his wife), the song bowls him over with its beauty, drowning out his plaintive reassurance to himself that “a man needs a maid”.

Hit or miss, every track lands somewhere and penetrates deeply. “Heart of Gold”, a true classic, teems with activity that radio over-play has made hard to notice. Young manages to fill every song with detail that manages never to sound busy. Even on his straightforward tunes, like “Are You Ready For The Country?”, the band sounds in perfect lockstep, playing off of and around each other, filling every second with shit that just plain sounds great. No matter the effect his band could have, no matter the recording techniques, it all goes out the window on “The Needle And The Damage Done”, where Young sings about losing his friends and fellow artists to drugs. He sounds like he’s in that delirium beyond despair, where one’s feelings couldn’t possibly surmount the bleakness they face. And this is where you see what lies behind all the recording techniques, the orchestra, the gleaming radio gold. Behind it all is a man exhuming an unfathomably deep store of pain, and using a pluckish guitar melody to burrow deep inside you and see whether you have it too.

Day 6: Serge Gainsbourg – Histoire de Melody Nelson

Wow, so I got thrown a curve ball here. I had previously enjoyed Serge Gainsbourg on the one thing I’d heard, Comic Strip, which was an innocuous yet staggeringly brilliant piece of pop music that inspired me to dig out my French-English dictionary and which took residence in my head for months afterward. I never listened to anything else of his, and simply forgot about him.

Months ago I got Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM and was pretty pleased with it, but it didn’t last for me. A few songs seemed brilliant, and I was flabbergasted to find myself digging on something Beck had been involved in, but on a whole the album felt uneven. For months afterwards I did find myself whistling the string part from Le Chat du Café des Artistes, and I particularly loved the way her breathy singing contrasted with the strong, vibrant strings.

Well, so imagine my surprise when I fired up this album this morning and discovered she was pretty much remaking her dad’s music note for note. Of course, Beck supplied the music for all but one of the songs on IRM, and Beck (post-Sea Change) is one of the artists pointed at as being the most distinctly influenced by Histoire de Melody Nelson; the whole thing is kinda creepy and circular.

The album is, in the standard of its year of birth, 1971, a concept album, about a man hitting a girl on a bicycle with his Rolls Royce and seducing her, having a whirlwind affair with her in luxurious hotels shortly after she turned 15. The music is unbearably sexy: the bass throbs, filling out the whole bottom half of every song, drums tip-toeing over it; in the stratosphere strings sing coldly, swooping into dissonance, and providing a glorious backdrop against which Serge can whisper. His delivery is hushed in a literal sense, insistently mumbling snatches of surreal French poetry. Pillow talk in the truest sense of the phrase, he speaks just loudly enough to be heard over the rustle of blankets and the quiet friction of adjusting arms and legs: “At fifty six, seven, eight, it doesn’t matter / X street, if you knock on the door / First one knock, then three others, they let you in / Alone and sometimes even accompanied.”

The music veers from style to style while always sounding unerringly coherent. The first and last track are quite long and serve to bookend the narrative. The tracks in the middle sum up a whirlwind romance in two-minute quips. The highlight, to me, is Ballade de Melody Nelson. The guitar in its swirling figure alone has more character than most full bands can muster in their combined talents. The plaintive bass punctuates the song, growling up from the turmoil just long enough to remind you how anxious the rest of it is.

Overall, what strikes me at the end of every listen is just how modern this sounds. This would be highly lauded if it came out today. The music is utterly sui generis, defying comparison, let alone categorization — lounge rock and roll? A spiritual predecessor to the storytelling of Nick Cave? Tiller of the soil in which Air, Beck, Portishead, and god knows who else would go on to find fruition?  Whatever words I try to weigh it down with, it responds unfailingly with but one: singular.