How can you not like this album? This is experimental Neil at his best, trying to tackle something new and infuse it with his own Neilness.

So, you think of the 80s, and you think of synthesizers. New Wave? Synth pop?

Neil puts together this album that is largely synthesizer-driven. Actually, that's not true. This album is primarily driven by Steve Jordan's drums, mic'd in such a way that it sounds like you're in a closet with them. Keyboards are layered on top of the drums, and last... BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST... Neil's trademark tortured distorted guitar periodically cuts through and slaps you senseless.

This album has a LOT of charm to it.

Lyrically:
"Take my advice, don't listen to me..."
"The wooden ships were just a hippie dream..."
An angelic-voiced boys choir singing "Got to fight to control the violent side..."

Samples & sound effects:
Breaking glass as percussion.
Screams punctuating that song "Pressure".
...and DAMN I don't know what they did to those drums throughout the album to make 'em sound so in-your-face, but... DAMN...

DAMN.

There are two types of absolutely wretched music. There is music so bad, you can not listen to it for a single second and there is music so bad you can not stop listening to it. For years devoted fans have been replaying songs from Bob Dylan's Christian period or John Lennon's projects with a sizable Yoko contribution, their ears begging them to turn it off but there curiosity ablaze, in wonderment how such typically wonderful artists could produce such appalling music.

Canadian folkie, Neil Young's foray into head-scratching badness was his affair with Geffen records. For whatever reason, Mr. Young left his label, Reprise and signed with Geffen in 1980. He released two fairly boring records, 1980's Hawks and Doves and 1981's Reactor before things really got absurd. In 1982, he released Trans, an album coated in ear piercing, Kraftwerk-ish synthesizer treatment, completely uncharacteristic of the rugged Mr. Young. He followed it with 1983's Everybody's Rocking, an album that presented a series of frivolous rockabilly songs, presented without a hint of irony or cheekiness and 1985's Old Ways, an almost stereotypically mummbly country album.

That brings us to 1986's Landing on Water, an album that continues along the trail of Trans, only without being at least somewhat interesting. While Lading on Water continues the overwhelming emphasis on synthesizer gloss of its predecessor, in place of Trans' experimentalism, the album is guided by conformity to the lowest denominator of the recent new wave movement. Landing on Water is so overrun with high-pitched vocals, instrumental hyperactivity and glaring keyboards that the Thompson Twins might find it ostentatious. Meanwhile, Mr. Young's lyrics have dropped to the level of banal dreck like "I knew some people used to dance all night/But not me/I never knew if it was wrong or right/To be so free/I used to close my eyes/And try to hide from the light of love/Spent all my time with the darkness inside/But when I met you girl." With the exception of the raging cynicism of "Hippie Dream," the garbly poet that used to be Neil Young is nowhere in sight. It seems as if Mr. Young intentionally meant himself to be unrecognizable.

He would later claim that he had grown to despise Geffen and was making such baffling creative decisions only to anger the corporation (who would sue Mr. Young shortly after the release of Landing on Water for providing them with music "unrepresentative of himself") and, listening to Landing on Water, it is not difficult to imagine Mr. Young and company absorbing everything absurd about new wave and parodying it, trying to imagine the look on poor, old David Geffen's face when he hears the final mix. Whatever his misguided intensions, this monster should be avoided by everyone except the most adamant Neil fans, ones dedicated enough to the singer-songwriter to want to explore his most perplexing eccentricities.

You know, it blows my mind that such seminal Young albums such as On The Beach and Time Fades Away are unavailable while the likes of Old Ways and this are still out there...

But don't get me wrong, I really do like this album. In fact, I like it a lot; I think it's the best thing Neil did during his "difficult" years on Geffen. When I first heard LoW, I hated it. Flat out hated it. I was still jonesing for the Neil Young of the Seventies and this certainly did not fit the bill. But y'know, the songs themselves were so strong that I eventually began to play it more and more, beginning with Hippie Dream, one of Neil's best in any decade, on through the shuffling People on the Street, Touch The Night with its choirish BV's, I Got A Problem (rocking and funky, with great guitar), and even the Devo-ish Pressure. This album comes across in a lot of ways like an attempt to revisit Trans, and in my opinion LoW works much better. After my initial reservations, I came to like Young's enhanced electric guitar and Steve Jordan's flat-sounding electronic drums (I mean sometimes they sound like a flat rubber stick on a wood block!) As the years have gone by, I still play Zuma or On The Beach or Tonight's The Night when I get in the mood for some Neil, but once in a while, when I least expect it, I get an urge to pull this one out and give it a spin. I always enjoy it, and I think you will, too, with an open mind.

Of all the 60s legends who took baffling artistic detours through the decade Kris Kristofferson described as "shipwrecked"--Dylan and the Stones come especially to mind--Neil Young's was by far the most fascinating. After responding to the epic success of the "Rust" albums with characteristically unpredictable forays into inaccessible pseudo-punk (Reactor) and rickety folk meanderings (Hawks & Doves), Neil Young journeyed to places few of his fans were willing to go: the electronica dance beats of "Trans" which, we later learned, featured electronically distorted vocals that emerged from attempts at communicating through a computer with his son Ben, a quadriplegic suffering from cerebral palsy.

In retrospect, the 80s are as legendary a period in Neil Young's career as his 70s heyday--not because the music was great, but precisely because it wasn't, culminating in the now-infamous lawsuit filed against Young by David Geffen for making music that didn't sound Neil young enough. Many like to call "Landing on Water" Neil's worst album, but that distinction--if we really must make it--belongs to the morbidly produced "Everybody's Rockin'". While Springsteen and Joel seemed to discover new voices with 50s nostalgia pieces like "Pink Cadillac" and "Uptown Girl" around the same time, Neil's flirtation with similar curiosities reflected, if anything, a voice that had become all but irretrievable.

It could hardly have been a surprise, then, that "Landing on Water" further exemplified the erratic artistic indulgences Young was favoring at the time, with its characteristically grungy licks and riffs laid over a jarring and misguided cacophony of synthesized drums and rhythms. It isn't just that the album sounds dated in 2006; the production is so insular that it was destined to sound dated before the year of its release came to a close. And yet, despite all this, "Landing on Water" contains three essential performances that die-hard and open-minded fans will learn to appreciate. "Hippie Dream"--with its moving eulogy for the bygone days of flower power--is a biting appraisal of an era he helped define, while "Drifter" and "Touch the Night" showcase a Neil Young who almost finds his groove amid the album's synth-laden idiosyncrasies.

These songs are treasures of an artistic vision stretching to fathom the boundaries of its expression, and the ambition of the material it produced at that time is, to my ears, every bit as beautiful as Young's best work. It may not always have sounded great--indeed, it usually strained just to sound listenable. But Neil's refusal to look away from less familiar artistic cravings is exactly the kind of edginess his reputation is founded on, and it is the good fan who understands glories like "Sleeps With Angels", "Freedom" and "Ragged Glory" could not have been possible without the misadventures that preceded them.

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I may be bias,since i bought this album as kid,so it didn't sound that bad too me,but the terriable reviews are overboard.Try and come up with one 60's or 70's artist that didn't suffer from 80's production and sound.It is one of neil's weaker cd's,up there with old way's and everybody's rockin,but i don't hate any of neil's work.there's some great song's here,hippie dream,touch the night,people in the street,drifter and maybe violent side.Dylan's 80's output was less than great too,so to judge this compaired to neil's classic period is unfair.probably only 3 star's,but someone has to give this one some love.