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List Price: $13.98 | | Label: Musicrama/Koch
Salesrank: 153835
Released: July 30, 2002 |
| Our Price: $34.99 |
| Used Price: $26.82 |
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| Media: Audio CD |
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Trans Track Listing:
1. Little Thing Called Love
2. Computer Age
3. We R in Control
4. Transformer Man
5. Computer Cowboy (AKA Syscrusher)
6. Hold on to Your Love
7. Sample and Hold
8. Mr. Soul
9. Like an Inca
Trans Reviews:
NIEL YOUNG 
2009-08-20 - I PURCHASED THE REGULAR ISSUE AND WHAT WAS SUPPOSE TO BE AN IMPORT. ONLY DIFFERENCE WAS ABOUT TWENTY BUCKS! IF THIS IS REVIEWING THE IMPORT, SHAME ON YOU AND A CURSE. THE MATERIAL CONTAINED IN BOTH IS GREAT. LISTEN TO THE COMPUTER AGE STUFF LIKE YOU WERE TAKING IN KRAFTWERK AND IT WILL SOUND BETTER. I LOVE NIEL, HE HAS TAKEN ME THROUGH A CHUNK OF MY LIFE. WORTH BUYING.
My favorite Young album 
2008-10-08 - Yep, the critics panned this album and I was hoping to pick up a used CD cheap when I checked out prices today. Whoah baby, looks like some folks out there value this music even more than me. Which is a good thing -- this album deserves a strong following.
The critics weren't totally wrong, many songs seem a bit stupid when you first hear them (I bought the LP back in '83) but they are catchy and occasionally deep. The album starts OK with "Little Thing Called Love" as a simple, sorta childish tune but the lyrics hold true; "Computer Age" and "We R in Control" are high energy; "Transformer Man" has a silly echo to the title words that somehow sticks in your mind, but is listenable.
Here's where the album gets good: "Computer Cowboy (AKA Syscrusher)" is an adolescent song with Young's voice all synth'd up; "Hold on to Your Love" is somehow upbeat and pleasing; "Sample and Hold" is slightly menacing about women as a consumer item; the remake of "Mr. Soul" is OUTSTANDING.
The only song I detest is "Like an Inca" because its serious lyrics were really mismatched with a floaty tune (or perhaps the whole being an Inca thing is the vacuous part and the tune is fine).
I HATE reviews full of adjectives, but I just tried it. Why? Well, because people need to erase their guitar-based idealism about Neil Young and just listen to the music, please. Neil was playing around, having fun with different styles, and this is a fun, energetic album. If you're a high roller and don't care about $40 or so to buy the CD used, get it.
I also HATE song-by-song reviews but I go through this to tell anyone thinking about buying a cheap LP and letting it play that it'll be OK. You won't have to jump and re-set the needle in annoyance (except when you hear the words "like an Inca" for the umpteenth time).
I'm gonna listen to my LP until I see better pricing on CDs.
Totally underrated. Currently available as a Geffen Import
2006-07-29 - This album is amazing. I had always steered clear of it due to the fact it got such bad reviews by critics, but I gotta say they were off-base. If this album were released in 1999 or 2000 it would have floored people especially those into the retrospective analysis of pioneering synth that occurred near the turn of the century. Lots of hipsters were like "Kraftwerk... blah blah... Jean Michel Jarre... blah" but as usual Neil was waaaaaaaay ahead of the curve.
Trans explores electronic music and technological distopia in a time where that wasn't run of the mill or the norm. Today this album is still fresh. If you hate synthesizers, you should probably steer clear, but if you love Neil Young you should not pass this up.
Amazon currently lists the domestic version as unavailable, you can get the Geffen Swedish import though here:
Trans [IMPORT]
quite a bizarre album, but Neil's passion and quality songwriting can't be denied
2006-02-20 - Neil Young has become notorious for the abrupt genre-hopping he has done, particularly throughout the '80s. That said, "Trans", which was originally released in December of 1982/ January of 1983, is a pretty bizarre album any way you look at it, and it's an album that you can't easily summarize.
The majority of "Trans" finds Neil going in a highly-synthesized direction, definitely New Wave-ish, but tracks such as "Computer Age" and "Sample and Hold" also have a distinct Europop feel. On all six of the album's 'high-tech' tracks, Neil used a vocoder to give his vocals a computerized effect--it's generally very effective, but the downside to it is that, frequently, the lyrics are incredibly hard, if not impossible, to decipher just by listening. This is atypical Neil Young stuff for sure, but you can tell he wasn't joking around. It's become well-known among fans that Neil Young was experiencing great frustration in the early '80s at his inability to communicate with his son Ben who was a quadriplegic suffering from cerebral palsy, and you can very much detect this theme on "Trans" in the lyrics to several of the songs, as well as with the back cover which shows what appears to be an electronic variation of a human heart. The difficulty in merely making out the words that Young is singing is a drawback, but still, "Computer Age" is atmospherically arresting and extremely catchy; the ominous "We R In Control" is powerful; and "Computer Cowboy", though a bit sluggish, is also highly effective. The ominous, robot dating service-themed "Sample And Hold" is also undeniably catchy, although the "Trans" CD I have contains the 8+ minute version which does drag in spots. On the down side, "Transformer Man" does sound quite thin and off-the-mark; and the stiff, robotic remake of "Mr. Soul" doesn't work very well and is pretty pointless.
What makes the album as a whole even more strange is that there are also three additional tracks, with 'regular' Neil vocals, that seem to have come from an entirely different project. Two of them are relatively conventional pop-rockers--the ballad "Hold On To Your Love" is wonderfully tuneful and uplifting; and the album-opening "Little Thing Called Love" is an irresistibly catchy confection with a somewhat tropical flavor, and notice at the end of the bridge the appearance of the very same acoustic guitar riff that would later re-emerge as the main riff on the song "Harvest Moon". The edgy, looping, 9+ minute album closer "Like An Inca", despite the slightly distracting, rattling acoustic guitar strumming (come on Neil, what the heck), is otherwise excellent, with a great harmonized chorus, a commanding lead vocal from Neil, and highly memorable, mysterious lyrics; the song, which bares an uncanny resemblance to Steely Dan's "Your Gold Teeth", is also interesting because it's basically structured in typical 'epic Neil' style, but Neil's usual 'mad soloing' is replaced by sliding leads and fluid guitar soloing that Neil obviously didn't (and couldn't) play.
With the exception of "Mr. Soul", Neil doesn't deliver any of his trademark noisy guitar soloing here. Don't get the wrong idea though--even with the abundance of synthesizers/ electronics on the album, there are still a lot of guitars. There are prominent, crunchy guitars on "We R In Control" and "Computer Cowboy", plus smooth double-tracked guitar on "Computer Age".
All in all, "Trans" is definitely a worthwhile record from Neil Young, thanks to his obvious passion and his consistently high quality songwriting.
A visionary treatise from Neil's lost decade.
2005-08-08 - We know-- now-- that this album, and indeed the bulk of Young's spotty, genre-hopping, fan-vexing 80s output, was directly influenced by the birth of his son Ben, Young's second child with cerebral palsy. This album was about Young's inability to communicate with the disabled child, and his frustration around it. indeed, armed with that understanding, in hindsight the distance between artist and listener here makes absolute sense.
When it came out, though, we didn't know that. And it was still my pick for 1983's album of the year.
Essentially, this album worked upon release as a meditation on man's embrace of technology, and the perils thereof. Young, as the archtypical organic musician-- alternating gorgeous folk albums with the raucous garage rock of Crazy Horse-- was the last artist you ever thought would go electronic. But look at the cover image of Trans; in the left lane coming toward you, a car from the future; in the right, speeding away, a car from the present (or recent past). Indeed cover up the left or right side of the cover drawing, and you alternately can see one or the other worlds, a confluence of paradoxical opposites.
That's what this album plays like to me; Young straddles the white lines between the two lanes, the two worlds-- the past and the future, one coming, one going. And he tells us what he sees.
"Little Thing Called Love" starts at the beginning, and is immediately recognizable as a solid Young rocker in the vein of "When You Dance." But then the techno stuff comes in, the synths, the vocoder. (Indeed the vocoder was a tool used by Young's son to communicate, but again, we didn't know that.) Instead what we heard was an artist wrapping himself in the sounds of technology, moving further and further away from familiar ground (and presaging much of the electronic and dance music that unfolded over the next 15 years.) It is especially startling that this is Neil Young making these sounds, and because it IS him-- instead of, say, the Cars or Eurythmics-- it makes the record especially confrontational. You can't chalk the influence of technology up to musical styles; this is NEIL YOUNG, for heaven sake, who's records are great precisely because they do NOT sound like the year in which they are recorded.
Late on side two (when it was a record with sides) he pushes the envelope, maybe even goes too far, by recasting the Buffalo Springfield classic "Mr. Soul" as a wierd hi-tech squeal; he performed this one solo live on his much-maligned Trans tour, and the thought that this is what he'd done with such a classic tune was disquieting. Would the 80s see him summarily trash all his precious back catalog in a similar fashion? Did we have solo electric vocoder versions of "Like a Hurricane" to look forward to?
But in a remarkably cathartic and redemptive track, he closes the album with "Like an Inca," a song that harkens back thematically to many of his Native North American-themed epics (notably "Cortez the Killer.") The searing Young electric guitar is back, and he seems to shake off the yoke of technology, planting both feet squarely and finally taking a stand, one you did not see coming. The album's climactic verse:
I feel sad, but I feel happy
As I'm coming back to home
There's a bridge across the river
That I have to cross alone
Like a skipping rolling stone
Like an Inca from Peru.
One of his most underrated songs.
So no, I did not understand his personal message on the record-- and he has called it his most personal recording-- but it still spoke volumes to me. Like many works of art, it stands alone and has meaning for the listener outside of the thing the artist thought he was addressing. On a micro level, Young is dealing with his anguish, guilt and frustration about his son; but on a macro level, one that we can relate to, he is tellng a story about mankind and the devil's deal we strike with technology. It rings as true today as it did in 1983. And if the futuristic songs now sound dated, in a sense so much the better.
It is not his finest work, not by a long shot; this is a man who put out 9 classics in the 70s alone (no wonder he was the Village Voice's artist of the decade): Zuma, On the Beach, Tonight's the Night, Rust Never Sleeps, Long May You Run, Comes a Time, Harvest, After the Gold Rush,and Deja Vu. As the 80s wore on he confounded with more genre exercizes (the dreadful rockabilly Everybody's Rockin', generic synth rock stuff like Landing On Water with Crazy Horse, as well as the welcome country Old Ways and the swing set, This Note's For You.) He studiously avoided sounding like-- avoided being-- Neil Young, until the Eldorado ep and then the longer Freedom album at the end of the decade. By the time he and the Horse convened in '91 for the incandescent and aptly named Ragged Glory, and he followed up with the solo Harvest Moon (one raucous garage rock, the other glorious folk), he was back and all was forgiven.
But Trans remains an important work, a visionary one, a challenging one, and maybe an essential one in the Young canon.
