Most people who would dare to pick up Arc, the companion piece to Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s double-live set Weld, would probably give this one listen and ask themselves: “What the fuck was he on?!?”
It is, after all, 35 minutes of guitar distortion, song snippets and random vocals—hardly the thing that one would expect from the same guy who gave them “Heart Of Gold” all those years before—and who would follow this up with Harvest Moon, undoubtedly his prettiest album in a long time (and, arguably, one of his best).
But anyone who paid even scant attention to Young’s career would know several things. First and foremost, he did what he wanted to, regardless of whether it flew in the face of public taste or what his label wanted from him. He followed his own Muse, wherever it took him. And, he was inspired by everything around him—in this case, the strange guitar tunings and feedback exercises of tour mates Sonic Youth.
So… borne out from all these circumstances is this very experimental disc. Mostly comprised of stretched-out endings of songs recorded on the same tour that gave us Weld, Young dares to push the envelope of just what can be described as music. It’s a daring experiment, to be sure—and, while it’s not something I can listen to often, it actually does serve a purpose.
Follow me here for a moment: avant-garde music was nothing new. John Lennon had practiced it with Yoko Ono. Artists such as Devo, Kate Bush and Penguin Cafe Orchestra had practiced avant-garde to some levels. It wasn’t as if Young was inventing a new chaotic audio sound; he simply was building on the backs of others, pushing his own music into new levels of “discomfort” in order to challenge the system.
Besides, Young had often been known to give the musical finger to the record company executives. His career with Geffen, after all, had been Young playing anything except what the label had expected him to do, from strange electronic music to doo-wop. Seeing that Young had recently reunited with the label that initially signed him, I question whether this was another extension of the musical middle digit; rather, it was Young simply being Young and doing whatever he damn well pleased.
Or am I simply overthinking this? Was Young simply daring to present the most abrasive portions of the live show into one “gummy lump,” challenging his fans to approach it on the same level he did when compiling it? I guess we’ll never really know… either way, Neil’s not returning my phone calls. (At least having the idea of the songs from where these were culled helps to put it together into some recognizable form at times.)
Whatever the case, Arc is a unique presentation of Young and his sometime backing group Crazy Horse, featuring the wildest musical portions from the tour. It most definitely is an acquired taste, and one would be hard-pressed to call it “must-own” material. That said, it is worth checking out at least once and trying to determine just where this falls into Young’s body of work.
It’s abrasive, it’s challenging, it’s occasionally difficult to listen to… but, hey, it’s Neil Young. Expect the unexpected.
