POP/ROCK

Neil Young, "Le Noise" (Reprise)

Young is an experimental artist working in a pop mode; he wants his music to be relevant, but he doesn't care about either proving himself great or staying hip, the usual stumbling blocks for aging baby-boomer rock stars. Young just wants to hear how something (a choir, an R&B band, a concept like the history of automobiles) sounds when it collides with his fundamental warped-folk sound. A strong sense of entitlement, the bane of many in his generation, is his ace in the hole. Not caring what anybody thinks keeps him attuned to himself.

He does make room for collaborators, though, and on "Le Noise," his 34th solo studio album, he engages in a clarifying dialogue. Young recorded the tracks in the home of producer Daniel Lanois, using just his voice and mostly electric guitar; the studio master then remixed and enhanced them. The result lands in the same ballpark as work by younger artists such as Joseph Arthur or even Best Coast, though the mood is more reflective.

At times, the sound heats up, as on the earnest "Walk With Me" and the Bo Diddley-touched "Rumblin'." But in general, this is an easy album to enjoy, something not always true of Young's recent output. "Le Noise" is not an epic -- if it were a book, you could read it in an afternoon -- but it's statement enough from a man who's already said so much.

ANN POWERS, LOS ANGELES TIMES

WORLD

King Sunny Ade, "Baba Mo Tunde" (Mesa/Bluemoon)

Good news: The longest track on this new double-disc album runs past 31 minutes. The new, 16-piece version of Ade's African Beats band recorded it recently in a Pennsylvania studio, with six chorus singers behind Ade's soft lead vocals, two players of the talking drum and the marvelous trap-set drummer Taiwo Sogo Ogunjimi-Oba. (The pedal-steel guitar, long an exotic mark in his band, is gone.)

The music, Yoruba praise-songs and parables with sprays of English, develops at its own schedule. The longer songs shuttle through segments of vamping, solos, verses and chants. The epic title track changes key exactly twice, and both times in the middle of short, lovely guitar solos by Ade. The title track and "Baba Feran Mi" end almost abruptly after lengthy talking-drum solos -- expressions of vitality that our logic might put in the middle of a piece. These are strange and sometimes thrilling ways of bringing modulation and closure.

At 64, Ade is still a beguiling guitarist, making gestural, staccato phrases on top of the music, letting high notes sweep up or down and trail off, spiking the rhythm over the cyclical patterns of the band's other guitarist, Segun Kalajaiye.

The record sags on the second disc. After the high of the title song, the Philadelphia remixer King Britt put his hand to a remix of the track, and the 15-minute result chugs along rigidly compared with what Ade's band can generate in real time: music that feels like repetition but never actually does the same thing twice.

BEN RATLIFF, NEW YORK TIMES