Landing On Water

Of all the confounding turns Neil Young’s career has taken, Landing on Water is easily his most atypical album. (Then again, Young spent most of the ‘80s trying to abolish the notion that there is even such a thing as the “typical Neil Young album.”) Suffice it to say that the highly processed, heavily synthesized sounds included here are the polar opposite of Harvest. Slap bass, overdriven electric guitars, and industrial rhythms all collide to create one of the most disturbing soundscapes of Young’s career. But the music proves to be the perfect match for a collection of Young’s most unsettling lyrics. Recurring themes are woven throughout the album: frustration, claustrophobia, violence, and loneliness. There are moments when the sound design of Landing on Water resembles David Bowie’s Low, or Genesis’s eponymous 1984 album, but the lyrical content belongs wholly to Young. What initially appears to be his most willfully difficult and oblique album gradually becomes an ultra-personal and very revealing portrait of its author’s innermost turmoil.