Le Noise is a true dream combo, a predestined collaboration between fellow ex-pat Canadian musical geniuses, Neil Young and Daniel Lanois, the latter of whom is best known for creating the signature sound on such classic albums as Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind and U2’s The Joshua Tree, among many others.

Young’s latest was recorded during four separate full moon sessions at Lanois’s California home, and despite this being a solo effort — accompanied by Young’s timeless signature electric guitar sound — Lanois’ fingerprints are all over this record.   But aside from the story that accompanies this album, there’s the music.

The album speaks to the recurring themes of much of Neil Young’s previous work: democracy, freedom, and forsaken America. “Hitchhiker” details the co-dependencies between drugs, music, and fame that plagued his past, including such indelible lines as, “Next I tried amphetamines/My head was in a glass/Taped underneath the speedometer wires/ Of my ’48 Buick’s dash / But I knew that wouldn’t last.” The raw honesty and emotional intensity in Young’s lyrics, voice, and tone cut to the marrow.

Neil plays, for the greater part, live, and flies solo throughout.  He’s playing rhythm and lead, bass and solo; it’s a virtuoso statement.  He relies on his two of his most legendary assets: his stand-by, Old Black — a heavily customized ’53 Gibson Les Paul — and a Gretsche White Falcon, the very same guitar he used to write “Ohio” 40 years ago.  This guitar has the added feature of having two input jacks — one for the top three strings, one for the bottom three — that allowed Lanois to rearrange the sound of Young’s guitar within the room. The effect is an electromagnetic opus that is at times challenging and disorienting, but never uninteresting. Especially fine are between-song feedback interludes following side-starters “Walk with Me” and “Angry World.”

Long-time Neil Young listeners will recognize the strength of craft in these numbers from beginning to end.  “Peaceful Valley Boulevard” details a country whose genocidal past is hidden by commercial imagery, exemplified by highway billboards and street signs.  “Love and War” is a pointed statement about the ineffability of both.  It falls short as a message of hope, and offers no answers.

Le Noise has an expansive feel, like Young has decided to stretch his sound even further beyond his previous sonic palette, which was already ponderous.  The listener hears every creek in Young’s voice, the bone structure in the unsettling “Rumblin” with its foreboding chorus, “I hear a rumblin’ in her ground/I hear a rumblin’,” and verse, “When will I learn how to give back?/When I learn how to heal?” with a crunchy riff that is the perfect accompaniment to catastrophe.  On Le Noise Young slips the gravitational bounds of his own iconography, shifting shapes like a true trickster, adding mystery upon mystery.

(Reprise Records, 3300 Warner Blvd., Burbank, CA. 91505)