Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan | Saved | <p>If Saved did anything, it proved that the born-again Christianity of Slow Train Coming wasn't merely a passing fad, and that it did, in fact, mean something significant to Dylan. Whether it meant something significant to his audience was another matter entirely, since this is where his religion overshadows his music, turning the album into a sermon to an audience that is nearly certainly unconverted -- and never will be, either. Dylan himself may be part of that audience, since he did back away from such a staunchly dogged viewpoint not long afterward, but that doesn't change Saved's status as being a fairly flat -- and, for Dylan, fairly pedestrian -- testament to his faith. And, if Slow Train Coming found him at a fairly creative peak of songwriting and supported by a supple backing band, he's turning out routine songs here, and the backing follows suit, resulting in his flattest record yet.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Shot Of Love | <p>Shot of Love finds Dylan still in born-again mode, but he's starting to come alive again -- which isn't as much a value judgment as it is an observation that he no longer seems beholden to repeating dogma, loosening up and crafting songs again. And it's not just that his writing is looser, the music is, too, as he lets himself -- and his backing band -- rock a little harder, a little more convincingly. Shot of Love still isn't a great album, but it once again has flashes of brilliance, such as "Every Grain of Sand," which point the way to the rebirth of Infidels.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Shot Of Love | <p>Shot of Love finds Dylan still in born-again mode, but he's starting to come alive again -- which isn't as much a value judgment as it is an observation that he no longer seems beholden to repeating dogma, loosening up and crafting songs again. And it's not just that his writing is looser, the music is, too, as he lets himself -- and his backing band -- rock a little harder, a little more convincingly. Shot of Love still isn't a great album, but it once again has flashes of brilliance, such as "Every Grain of Sand," which point the way to the rebirth of Infidels.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Trouble No More - The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13 [1979-1981] | <p>Bob Dylan converted to Christianity in 1979. Like many who have been born again, Dylan spoke and sang solely of his faith for a brief period -- roughly half a year, beginning in November of 1979 and ending in May of 1980. Facing a fan base who were generally furious at his newfound religion, Dylan started to thread some oldies into his set lists but he didn't leave gospel behind until he released Infidels in 1983.</p><p>Once he returned to secular music, he didn't abandon all the songs that he wrote during this period -- and it's also unclear what became of his faith, as he stopped speaking of it in concrete terms in public -- yet these three years remained one of Dylan's least understood phases, possibly because the studio albums he released between 1979 and 1981 were cocooned in studio gloss. Trouble No More, the 13th instalment of The Bootleg Series, attempts to right the record by collecting a wealth of live material from this period, supplementing these cuts with unreleased studio tracks, including a few songs that have never seen the light of day.<p>Whether it's appreciated in its lavish eight-CD/single-DVD box set or its judiciously edited double-disc companion, Trouble No More performs the same function: it illuminates the passion driving this music. Unlike Another Self Portrait, this Bootleg Series installment offers a different perspective of a maligned phase, but it doesn't provide a jolting revelation, not even with several unveiled Dylan originals in tow. A few of these songs would've enhanced either Saved or Shot of Love -- in particular, "Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody" feels robust as it dodges confession -- but the execution matters more than the content. Dylan did write a handful of classics during this time but the tunes tend to be overshadowed by the ragged, soulful performances, where the songs -- both major and minor -- get reshaped on-stage and in the studio. The band impresses -- this music, which sounded so slick on the released records, has grit, swing and soul -- but they're only following their leader, who is chasing a muse that may still remain elusive to his audience.</p><p>Dylan may not articulate his conversion in words -- these are among his stiffest lyrics, allowing no room for ambiguity yet still bearing some playfulness -- but Trouble No More, more than Saved or even the fine Slow Train Coming, is buoyed by the music. Whether he's singing a slight song, easing into testimony, or leaning into a blues, Dylan seems engaged, even on the verge of rapture, an excitement that carries through the full live shows from 1980 and 1981 on the Deluxe Edition, where he reworks his old tunes -- "Maggie's Farm" is driven by a wild, twisting riff -- in hopes that they open the door to his new thing. Few appreciated his trip at the time, but years later it feels compelling, possibly because it's allowed to be messy and soulful within the parameters of The Bootleg Series.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>In the autumn of 1978, Bob Dylan began performing a new version of "Tangled Up in Blue." In addition to a complete melodic makeover, he updated a lyric that had previously referenced an unnamed Italian poet to address a more specific source text: "She opened up the Bible and started quoting it to me/Jeremiah, Chapter 13, verses 21 and 33." Debuted during the tour behind his directionless Street Legal LP, his new arrangement of the beloved track offered a glimpse at Dylan's next reinvention: You can hear a white light starting to seep in.</p><p>Right around that time, Dylan introduced a new song to his band called "Slow Train Coming." That track appears in four vastly different versions on Trouble No More, the fascinating new Bootleg Series release covering his fruitful but polarizing era as an evangelical Christian songwriter between 1979 and 1981. The earliest rendition on the collection stems from his '78 tour rehearsals when the verses were not yet finalized and Dylan mostly just hammered in the chorus: "There's a slow/Slow train coming/Around the bend," he sings over and over again as his backing vocalists' performance grows increasingly dramatic with each repetition. It's a stirring, uncanny document of an artist discovering his new sound—an ominous take on gospel to which he'd devote himself for the next three years.</p><p>"Slow Train Coming" would become the title track to the first entry in Dylan's "Christian trilogy." These albums, which draw on the grainy, burnt-out blues sound he'd adopt more fully in the 21st century, remain the most mysterious items in one of rock music's deepest, most daunting discographies. On principle alone, they turned off multitudes of fans who once admired Dylan's staunch individualism and leftist politics. But for Dylan, they signified a rebirth, both creatively and personally. By the end of the decade, his longevity as a rock icon was unprecedented: Elvis was gone; The Beatles had been broken up as long they'd been around; the "new Dylans" like Springsteen were now welcoming their own disciples. When the "old Dylan"—just pushing 40—found himself uninspired on what had become known as his "Las Vegas Tour," the Bible offered a way forward, even if it didn't provide the answers he might have wanted.</p><p>For the most part, the songs on Trouble No More do not reflect the hope or contentment usually associated with praise music. They are as venomous and full of doom as Dylan's more celebrated writing on war, politics, or love. Neither as warm and embracing as Cat Stevens' nor as spiritually wise as Leonard Cohen's, Dylan's religious work seems to come from a place of fear—borderline paranoia. Inspired by the best-selling Hal Lindsey book The Late Great Planet Earth, he constantly pairs his acceptance of Jesus with warnings of an imminent apocalypse. In a catchy song called "Precious Angel," propelled by a bouncy, pinched Mark Knopfler guitar riff, he looks to the future and sings of "darkness that will fall from on high/When men will beg God to kill them and they won't be able to die." In many songs, Dylan quotes directly from the Bible. In others, he sings as first-person "I," instructing "you" to follow his lead and make a change or risk facing unthinkable consequences: a strange play on the messianic presence he'd assumed in the lives of his fans. "I told you the answer was blowing in the wind, and it was," he allegedly announced at a show, "I told you the times they were a-changing, and they did. And I'm telling you Christ is coming back—and he is!"</p><p>To perform this material live, Dylan pressed reset on his songbook, ignoring the nearly two decades of work that preceded Slow Train Coming. He was debuting new music at every concert—songs that would eventually appear on the sharply focused Saved in 1980 and the more eclectic Shot of Love the following year. In the absence of his hits, he fleshed out setlists with faithful covers of devotional songs like Dallas Holm's "Rise Again" and hymns performed by a four-person gospel choir who toured with him. Fans were perplexed. Throughout a stunning San Francisco performance of "Pressing On," one of his finest gospel songs, the audience remains silent. They refuse to clap along during the a capella break, inadvertently bringing the hard-won battle in its lyrics to life. There's a captivating tension in hearing an artist so revered, so evangelized, preach to empty seats—an energy that pervades the set and makes this one of Dylan's most haunting and vulnerable collections of music.</p><p>Trouble No More exists in several editions. The most comprehensive set includes two live shows from the era; two discs of tour highlights; two discs of outtakes and rarities; and a bizarre concert film interrupted by newly filmed scenes of actor Michael Shannon reciting sermons in a vacant church (likely in the absence of Dylan's own between-song sermons, which have mysteriously and perhaps mercifully been edited out). These recordings beat out their studio counterparts at nearly every turn. Stemming largely from live shows and rehearsals, they avoid the tinny production and glossy pastiche of the records, highlighting this era's latent strengths: the unnerving conviction in Dylan's vocals, his killer backing band, and, most of all, the underlying strength of the material.</p><p>Songs that previously felt like hidden gems in Dylan's catalog become centerpieces. A live rendition of "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar" features bombastic, blazing guitar solos from guest performer Carlos Santana as Dylan spits his way through the lyrics, making its surreal narrative even more impassioned. "When He Returns," the closing track on Slow Train Coming, appears in stark, definitive form, on solo piano and organ at a 1980 show in Toronto. Dylan's voice sounds beautiful, fanatical, and somewhat insane, which is exactly how this material should be delivered.</p><p>Unlike other editions of the Bootleg Series exploring Dylan's mythically productive studio sessions, the outtakes are not the main draw here. The slow, stately "Making a Liar Out of Me" comes closest to a lost classic, though the band's performance is too tentative for it to truly transcend. Less ambitious tracks like "Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody" and "Ain't No Man Righteous, No Not One" are pleasant but steer close to "Schoolhouse Rock!" levels of singalong didacticism. While Dylan was writing prolifically at this time, his relentless output felt more like a search for the right words as opposed to an overflow of inspiration. For the most part, the best songs all ended up on the albums. What's more interesting is how the material evolved from its early forms to the studio renditions and onto the stage. With key tracks appearing in multiple incarnations, the set examines how Dylan reapproached this material the longer he lived with it: how "Gotta Serve Somebody" ascended from a bitter confession to a twisted roll call, or how the livestock in "Man Gave Names to All the Animals" slowly disassembled over the course of the tour.</p><p>By 1981, Dylan eased up on his evangelism. He introduced decidedly secular new material to his shows—like the excellent "Caribbean Wind" and the not-so-excellent "Lenny Bruce"—and welcomed back old favorites like "Maggie's Farm" and "Like a Rolling Stone." Soon, he would disown this entire era. He abandoned its material in later setlists and denied he'd ever even been a Christian, citing it as just another example of the media's unfair insistence on labeling him at every turn. "I mean, nobody cares what Billy Joel's religious views are," he spat at one interviewer, who could have responded by pointing out that Billy Joel never wrote a song called "Property of Jesus." Regardless of his true beliefs, Trouble No More offers living proof of Dylan's commitment at the time. Across these 102 tracks, he sounds as devoted to his work as ever, puncturing a style of music built to offer definitive answers with his own heavy brand of cosmic nihilism.</p><p>The era came to a close with "Every Grain of Sand," the final track on Shot of Love. Allegedly written fully-formed at the piano in the summer of 1980, it remains one of his most powerful compositions: If the sole purpose of his religious search was to lead him here, then the journey was worth it. The track appears twice on Trouble No More, as an intimate rehearsal midway through the tour and a full-band performance on its very last night, before he took a three-year break from live shows and mostly abandoned religious music (at least until his 2009 curio Christmas in the Heart). Between those two takes, Dylan's voice lowered and the song's pace slowed, trading its epiphanic intensity for a comforting sense of foresight and calm. Together, they summarize the story told throughout Trouble No More: one man's path from fear to acceptance, obsession to understanding, getting born and pressing on.</p><p>— <strong>Sam Sodomsky</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Infidels | <p>Infidels was the first secular record Bob Dylan recorded since Street Legal, and it's far more like a classicist Dylan album than that one, filled with songs that are evocative in their imagery and direct in their approach. This is lean, much like Slow Train Coming, but its writing is closer to Dylan's peak of the mid-'70s, and some of the songs here -- particularly on the first side -- are minor classics, capturing him reviving his sense of social consciousness and his gift for poetic, elegant love songs. For a while, Infidels seems like a latter-day masterpiece, but toward the end of the record it runs out of steam, preventing itself from being a triumph. Still, in comparison to everything that arrived in the near-decade before it, Infidels is a triumph, finding Dylan coming tantalizingly close to regaining all his powers.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Real Live | <p>It may be his first live album in six years, but Real Live still is his fourth live album in ten years, and, as such, it still feels a little redundant. Nevertheless, it doesn't feel anywhere nearly as unnecessary as At Budokan and if it doesn't capture a historically significant tour, as Hard Rain did with the Rolling Thunder Revue, this is a better record all the same, capturing a working band -- a working band featuring ex-Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, no less -- on a pretty good night. That means there are few revelations -- though diehards will certainly revel in "Tangled Up in Blue," which has several brand-new (not necessarily better) verses -- but it's still pretty good all the same, providing lean, relatively muscular renditions of Dylan's great songs. This isn't an important, necessary Dylan record, but it's a good, solid live album, his best live album since Before the Flood, even if it's hardly as monumental as that.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Empire Burlesque | <p>Say what you want about Empire Burlesque -- at the very least, it's the most consistent record Bob Dylan has made since Blood on the Tracks, even if it isn't quite as interesting as Desire. However, it is a better set of songs, all deriving from the same place and filled with subtle gems -- the most obvious being "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)," but also "Emotionally Yours" and "Dark Eyes" -- proving that his powers are still there. The rest of the album may not be as graceful, but it's still well-crafted songwriting that never fails to be interesting. The record's biggest flaw is its state-of-the-art production; this is every bit as slick as Street Legal, but now sounds more focused and more of its time -- thanks to a reliance on synthesizers and mildly sequenced beats -- than it did upon its original release. All this makes Empire Burlesque seem more transient than it actually is, since -- discounting the production -- this is as good as Dylan gets in his latter days.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Biograph | <p>Historically, Biograph is significant not for what it did for Dylan's career, but for establishing the box set, complete with hits and rarities, as a viable part of rock history. Following Biograph, multi-disc box sets for veteran rockers became accepted and almost the norm, but that doesn't discount this set's strengths as a summary of Dylan's career, using the familiar and the rare to draw a fully rounded portrait of his strengths as a songwriter, musician, and record-maker in a way that conventional choices alone couldn't achieve. Certainly, the chief attraction of this set, even years after its initial release, is its smattering of rarities that aren't just rare, but revealing -- ranging from forgotten rock B-sides and singles to demos, alternate takes, and unreleased songs that rival official releases. But Biograph is really remarkable for weaving these songs into a fabric that reveals the true trajectory of Dylan's career, offering as much to the curious as it does to the dedicated. That sets a standard for box sets that has rarely been matched, making Biograph all the more impressive in retrospect. [In 1997, Columbia Records issued an upgraded, reconfigured version of Biograph, with a new catalog number (65298), a lower list price, and with its packaging and booklet reduced from an LP-size box to a CD-size slipcase. The original 1985 set in the large-size box, which marked the first time that the label had gone back to original first-generation tapes on a Dylan CD, was pretty impressive; but the 1997 CD-size box version, remastered in Sony's Super Bit Mapping process, is a significant improvement over that, and is to be preferred.]</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Biograph | <p>Historically, Biograph is significant not for what it did for Dylan's career, but for establishing the box set, complete with hits and rarities, as a viable part of rock history. Following Biograph, multi-disc box sets for veteran rockers became accepted and almost the norm, but that doesn't discount this set's strengths as a summary of Dylan's career, using the familiar and the rare to draw a fully rounded portrait of his strengths as a songwriter, musician, and record-maker in a way that conventional choices alone couldn't achieve. Certainly, the chief attraction of this set, even years after its initial release, is its smattering of rarities that aren't just rare, but revealing -- ranging from forgotten rock B-sides and singles to demos, alternate takes, and unreleased songs that rival official releases. But Biograph is really remarkable for weaving these songs into a fabric that reveals the true trajectory of Dylan's career, offering as much to the curious as it does to the dedicated. That sets a standard for box sets that has rarely been matched, making Biograph all the more impressive in retrospect. [In 1997, Columbia Records issued an upgraded, reconfigured version of Biograph, with a new catalog number (65298), a lower list price, and with its packaging and booklet reduced from an LP-size box to a CD-size slipcase. The original 1985 set in the large-size box, which marked the first time that the label had gone back to original first-generation tapes on a Dylan CD, was pretty impressive; but the 1997 CD-size box version, remastered in Sony's Super Bit Mapping process, is a significant improvement over that, and is to be preferred.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Oh Mercy | <p>Oh Mercy was hailed as a comeback, not just because it had songs noticeably more meaningful than anything Bob Dylan had recently released, but because Daniel Lanois' production gave it cohesion. There was cohesion on <i>Empire Burlesque</i>, of course, but that cohesion was a little too slick, a little too commercial, whereas this record was filled with atmospheric, hazy production -- a sound as arty as most assumed the songs to be. And Dylan followed suit, giving Lanois significant songs -- palpably social works, love songs, and poems -- that seemed to connect with his past. And, at the time, this production made it seem like the equivalent of his '60s records, meaning that its artiness was cutting edge, not portentous. Over the years, <i>Oh Mercy</i> hasn't aged particularly well, seeming as self-conscious as such other gauzy Lanois productions as <i>So</i> and <i>The Joshua Tree</i>, even though it makes more sense than the ersatz pizzazz of Burlesque. Still, the songs make Oh Mercy noteworthy; they find Dylan quietly raging against the materialism of President Reagan and accepting maturity, albeit with a slight reluctance. So, <i>Oh Mercy</i> is finally more interesting for what it tries to achieve than for what it actually does achieve. At its best, this is a collection of small, shining moments, with the best songs shining brighter than their production or the album's overall effect.</p>— <b>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b> |
| Bob Dylan | The Bootleg Series Vols 1-3 | <p>This three-disc box set is what Dylanphiles have been waiting for, sitting patiently for years, even decades. And, even after its 1991 release, it retains the feeling of being a special, shared secret among the hardcore, since -- no matter the acclaim -- it's the kind of record that only the hardcore will seek out. Of course, the great irony is that even casual Dylan fans will find much to treasure in this three-disc set of unreleased material. They'll find songs as good as anything that made the records (sometimes surpassing the official releases, especially on the last disc), plus alternate versions (including original versions of songs on Blood on the Tracks) and long-fabled songs, from the incomplete "She's Your Lover Now" to songs cut from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. This doesn't just function as an alternate history of Dylan, but as an expansion of Dylan's history, enriching what is already known about the greatest songwriter of his era -- after all, every song here would qualify as the best song on anybody else's album. And that's no exaggeration.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Good As I Been To You | <p>Given the acclaim of The Bootleg Series and the perceived disappointment of Under the Red Sky, it seemed like it was time for Dylan to bounce back with a convincing album of original material. Instead, he delivered a record of folk songs, his first straight covers album ever, not to mention his first guitar, harmonica, and voice record since the early '60s. That alone would make it an anomaly, but Good as I Been to You is more than that, because it's a really good traditional folk album, having just enough familiar tunes -- "Frankie & Albert," "Blackjack Davey," "Sittin' on Top of the World," "Froggie Went a Courtin'" -- to provide an entryway to the less familiar numbers, which are delivered equally well. Yes, this could be seen as a rather unassuming record, but that's what's special about it. In 1992, not even folksingers were working with this material, but Dylan did, reviving folk's (and rock's) ties to the past at an unexpected time and with unexpectedly strong results. A minor high point in his catalog.</p><p>— <b>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Time Out Of Mind | <p>After spending much of the '90s touring and simply not writing songs, Bob Dylan returned in 1997 with Time Out of Mind, his first collection of new material in seven years. Where Under the Red Sky, his last collection of original compositions, had a casual, tossed-off feel, Time Out of Mind is carefully considered, from the densely detailed songs to the dark, atmospheric production. Sonically, the album is reminiscent of Oh Mercy, the last album Dylan recorded with producer Daniel Lanois, but Time Out of Mind has a grittier foundation -- by and large, the songs are bitter and resigned, and Dylan gives them appropriately anguished performances. Lanois bathes them in hazy, ominous sounds, which may suit the spirit of the lyrics, but are often in opposition to Dylan's performances. Consequently, the album loses a little of its emotional impact, yet the songs themselves are uniformly powerful, adding up to Dylan's best overall collection in years. It's a better, more affecting record than Oh Mercy, not only because the songs have a stronger emotional pull, but because Lanois hasn't sanded away all the grit. As a result, the songs retain their power, leaving Time Out of Mind as one of the rare latter-day Dylan albums that meets his high standards.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>Not long after attending the California funeral of his friend Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan found himself snowbound at his Minnesota farm. He would listen to the storms and write after the sun sank from the winter sky. Those songs turned the cold environment into a crystalline lens on the tiring world—a place that was "not dark yet, but getting there," where "the blues [were] wrapped around my head."</p><p>What Dylan had left to say or whether he had any enthusiasm left for saying it had, for a while, been unclear. Seven years had passed since he had released an original new tune, and that album, Under the Red Sky, was a near-catastrophe, scuttling what had seemed a comeback after Dylan crept through his polarizing '80s evangelism. He had grown disillusioned with the cycle of writing and recording, he later said, and simply wanted to play.</p><p>During the '90s, he issued two solo acoustic albums of earnest, sometimes poignant renditions of American standards, delighting those who had pined for the lost days of the folk kid from Greenwich Village. But coffeehouse covers hadn't made Dylan a spark of resistance in the '60s or a source of bittersweet reckonings with reality in the '70s. He had become a legacy act, accruing lifetime achievement laurels and touring his hits for Boomers in khakis. Possibly for the first time in his career, Dylan was beginning to blend into the scenery.</p><p>But months after Garcia's funeral, Dylan approached the audacious producer Daniel Lanois. Since helming the contentious sessions for what many had prematurely considered Dylan's actual comeback, 1989's half-stepping Oh Mercy, Lanois had cut U2's Achtung Baby and Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball, a wondrously atmospheric abstraction of the singer's gorgeous and aging country vision. In a New York hotel room, Dylan read Lanois the lyrics and asked him if he had a record. "I said, 'Yes, Bob, I think we've got a record,"' Lanois remembered with a sly laugh during a recent phone call.</p><p>Dylan sent Lanois home with a list of reference records to study—Charley Patton, Little Walter, Little Willie John, a mix of ragged blues and primordial rock. "I listened to these records, and I understood," Lanois wrote in his memoir, Soul Mining. "A new birth with the old dogs under your arm, like a stack of classic books." In the end, that rebirth was Time Out of Mind, Dylan's 30th album and one that doesn't sound much like the basic blues at all. Instead, it is an essential post-modern reappraisal of them, an experimental consideration of what could become of the blues' sound and spirit and a mutual communion of articulate, exquisite despair. At the last minute, Lanois took Dylan's blurry snapshot for the cover of Time Out of Mind; on tape, that's exactly how he had captured him.</p><p>The next year was a reminder of what Dylan said he despised about making records—extended seaside sessions on the Atlantic and the Pacific, guitars smashed in anger, a militia of Nashville crackerjacks and world-class session players who had to be told more than once to play a lot less. Lanois and Dylan fought like hell in the parking lot of the Miami studio where they recorded, but after more than half a year and many mixes, overdubs, and lyrical revisions, Time Out of Mind—11 songs that would transform Dylan from seemingly obsolete icon to wise, wizened visionary almost overnight—was finished. And then Dylan nearly died.</p><p>Four months before Time Out of Mind arrived and just days after his 56th birthday, Dylan was admitted into a Los Angeles hospital after persistent chest pains that suggested a heart attack. Instead, acute pulmonary histoplasmosis—a nasty fungal infection caused by bird-and-bat feces in the country's most fertile river valleys—had inflamed the covering around his heart and nearly killed him. "I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon," he said later. For weeks between his hospital release and the album's release, Dylan was bedridden, emerging just in time to play for the pope in Rome and sit for a series of high-profile interviews that inquired not only about his near-death experience but also that of his career.</p><p>Dylan's brush with Elvis made for an easy press hook, especially given the twilit misery of Time Out of Mind. In its four-star review, Rolling Stone noted the album "confront[-ed] his advancing years and the prospects of failing health." In a moment of too-soon chicanery, Newsweek's cover joked "Dylan Lives."</p><p>But Time Out of Mind is not merely about death, though its inevitability looms at the periphery of these songs with the certainty of the setting sun; sometimes, death even seems for Dylan like the easy, desirous exit. Instead, Time Out of Mind is about dealing with life and its itinerant lows, knowing how it will all end, anyway. The blues become an emotional state of being. Through the cobwebs of his beleaguered voice, Dylan musters all the feelings of losing love, full of pride and insanity and lust and violence and humor, implicitly navigating the five stages of grief.</p><p>He writes with the hardened edge of Hemingway, trying to cloak feelings with callouses and sweetening his bitterness with a dash of wit. A portrait of the sometimes-awful truth about life and love, Time Out of Mind stands alongside Mark Rothko's so-called Black Paintings, conceived in poor health just before he killed himself, for its ability to stand at the lip of an abyss and stare into it. If you look long enough at the Rothko or listen closely to the Dylan, the most unexpected shapes will eventually stumble out of the dark.</p><p>Dylan begins in a bout of denial. At the start of "Love Sick," he shuffles through empty streets in the rain, a tangle of warped guitar, haunted organs, and faint drums aptly framing his bleak mood. He is mad at the world, judging its smiling people and castigating its illusion of happiness. "I'm sick of love/I wish I'd never met you," he calmly seethes in the closing chorus, addressing his ire not at anyone in particular but at the idea of human connection at large. "I'm sick of love/I'm trying to forget you."</p><p>But the first five minutes of "Love Sick," which sound so preternaturally cool and ultimately unaffected that the song was immortalized in a Victoria's Secret advertisement, are purely a pose. After Dylan sashays through that last refrain, he collapses into the confession that sets the tone for most of Time Out of Mind: "Just don't know what to do/I'd give anything to be with you," he sings, his voice now curdled. The band pulls back from the pulse and lets the melody dangle against the open air, as if they too are surprised by the sudden candor of their maestro. This is the moment where we get to the heart of Time Out of Mind, where Dylan crawls inside his own depression.</p><p>For most of the next 70 minutes, that's where he stays: Dylan's misery is so exhaustive that, during "Dirt Road Blues," he turns the sight of a rainbow into an instance of pain. Elsewhere, parties give him headaches. He is alternately cold and broke, hot and aimless. "It's such a sad thing to see beauty decay," he half-howls during "Cold Irons Bound," an aired litany of grievances that finds him losing most everything he holds sacred. "It's sadder still to feel your heart turn away."</p><p>Dylan hits rock-bottom during a duo of creeping existential crises, mercifully separated here by a swaggering barroom prowl. During "Not Dark Yet," he tells us he has been to "London… and 'gay Paree,"' reminders that he is a worldly sort who has had success and lived well. But here he is, shattered by the most pedestrian of things—love, or the loss of it—and tragically concluding "There's not even room enough to be anywhere." A decade before, he was coming down from his great Christian awakening. Now, he doesn't "even hear the murmur of a prayer." How could he fall further?</p><p>Lanois' production has often been criticized for warping Dylan's voice too much, for burying it in a cloud of effects. In early Time Out of Mind demos and outtakes, after all, Dylan practically sounds like Etta James, riding on top of his blues; on the record itself, he is pushing the words upward as an act of mere survival, letting them out so he can breathe back in. But the pervading murk of "Not Dark Yet" is exactly what these lyrics demand. As with the transmuted blues of Loren Connors or Grouper, Lanois lets Dylan flicker at the threshold of existence here, giving his troubles a sense of mortal urgency.</p><p>"Trying to Get to Heaven" is about being uncomfortable with everything and everyone everywhere—kicked out of Missouri, given false consolation in New Orleans, taken for a ride to nowhere in Baltimore. In the end, he simply falls asleep to escape inside his dreams, a world that now seems as concrete and meaningful as the actual people around him.</p><p>Strange as it may sound, "Trying to Get to Heaven" has long felt inspirational, given the subsequent arc of Dylan's career. "When you think that you've lost everything/You find out you can always lose a little more," he half-grunts toward the end, reaching the apogee of his sadness. But Time Out of Mind won three Grammys and kick-started Dylan's true second coming—a string of self-produced, hyper-stylized albums that turned his love of the blues, standards, and literature into impressionistic, intricate Americana and helped him on his way to a Pulitzer. In your grimmest moments, just remember how near-death Dylan sounds here—and exactly how much life he actually had left.</p><p>Even deep in his own hurt, Dylan maintains a sense of pride, hoping to preserve some dignity as he approaches his end. Amid the sad, stately waltz of "Standing in the Doorway," he tells his best lie: "I would be crazy if I took you back," he sings, the slide guitars curling beneath him like confused question marks. "It would go up against every rule." This is what he is supposed to say, of course, to save face when the entire album is about how not getting her back will be his ruin. Who hasn't been here before—completely despondent, but trying to pretend you've got the upper hand in some romantic standoff?</p><p>This is the softer, more playful side of Dylan's anger, but it occasionally flashes into hints of violence. When he croons "Don't know if I saw you, if I'd kiss you or kill you" early in the album, it feels like a lonely abstraction, a what-if penned from a distance. By record's end, though, it has morphed into real menace. Breathing fast, pulse racing, he's doing his best to hold himself together during "Can't Wait," trying not to lash out or do something he will live to regret. The guitars slash, and the organs roar, fighting the same urge to explode. "If I ever saw you comin', I don't know what I might do," he yells as best he can. "I'd like to think I could control myself, but it isn't true." His sadness, at last, has beaten his civility.</p><p>In spite of its presiding gloom, Time Out of Mind actually delivered a new Dylan standard—his first hit in decades and a song that has become almost as ubiquitous as "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Forever Young," even if he mostly hasn't been the one to sing it. A month before Time Out of Mind arrived, Billy Joel turned the spare ballad "Make You Feel My Love" into a bombastic, string-swept single, shouting the lyrics and howling behind the harmonica like it was he who stepped onstage at Newport in 1965. Twin versions by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood soundtracked the 1998 rom-com Hope Floats, while takes from Neil Diamond, Ed Sheeran, and Kelly Clarkson have followed. But it was Adele's piano-and-cello lament—and its subsequent appearance on "Britain's Got Talent"—that turned Dylan's ostensible love song into an international standard and, according to Adele, made Dylan at least a million pounds in a year.</p><p>But what is there on Time Out of Mind to suggest that Dylan had suddenly turned soft for three minutes, that he would dip so smoothly into guileless piano ballads? Absolutely nothing. In the preceding song, he's so tormented his crops are dying and all his friends are traitors; in the next song, he wonders again if he could control his violent impulses if he encountered his paramour. This isn't the sort of person who shuffles over to the piano and readily forgives. This is the sort of person your friends warn you about, the guy who shows up drunk at 3 a.m. and slurs drunken promises as he bullies the doorbell.</p><p>All the song's romantic images about warm embraces and dried tears and self-sacrifice are purely hypothetical, things he "could" do if the subject would simply submit to his advances already. In the five stages of grief, this is bargaining, and it's a particularly nasty business here. "I know you haven't made your mind up yet, but I would never do you wrong," he pleads, the trace of guilt in his voice vanishing as quickly as it appeared. He makes his demand clear. "I've known it from the moment that we met/No doubt in my mind where you belong." In context, "Make You Feel My Love" is not a romantic bauble; it is an ironclad threat in a velvet glove, one final attempt to force love from the listener at any cost.</p><p>The Dylan faithful largely hated "Make You Feel My Love" from the start. Ian Bell—the late British journalist and exhaustive Dylan analyst—quipped that the song "should have been shipped off instantly, gratis, to Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, and the rest of the balladeers who would take the vapid things to their sentimental hearts." It is a song worth reconsidering, though, not in Joel's mawkish translation or even Adele's austere one but instead in its original setting. Those famous covers alternately sound triumphant or plaintive, suitable enough for a standalone single.</p><p>But even as Dylan plays tender piano above a pillow-top organ, he sounds absolutely broken, the cracks of his voice widening into chasms. There's occasionally a whisper of percussion and a distant acoustic guitar lick, but he's mostly left to wrestle these feelings himself. This is the real pit of his desperation, concealed to read like romance in order to save face. It is an essential piece of this picture, a last-ditch attempt for sanity from someone who has lost control.</p><p>In the end, Dylan pulls himself together, at least enough to survive for a while longer. Time Out of Mind ends with "Highlands," a brilliant and occasionally hilarious 17-minute shuffle that frames life's endless numbered days as a string of largely meaningless moments. "Feel like I'm driftin', driftin' from scene to scene," Dylan mumbles in a monotone fit for someone who has simply resigned himself to exist. "I'm wonderin' what in the devil could it all possibly mean." He listens to Neil Young, avoids a sad dog, ponders his wardrobe, envies young people, and details an awkward encounter with a waitress in a Boston café that paints him as an artist perennially uncomfortable with his audience. All the while, he daydreams of the Scottish Highlands and its verdant scenery—for him, heaven, or "where I'll be when I get called home." He understands his age and fate, even if he longs for youth. Without the ballast of his love, this moribund acceptance becomes his life.</p><p>The total craft of Time Out of Mind, the dry spell that preceded it, and the saga that produced it collectively serve a cautionary function. If you hadn't given up on Dylan by 1997, you were either a zealot who would eke merit from most anything he made or a casual fan who had stopped paying enough attention to have a strong opinion. But the sophistication and nuance of Time Out of Mind work only because Dylan had become a wunderkind, gone electric, faced backlash, crashed his motorcycle, wrecked his marriages, found his faith, faltered in it, fathered a family, seen his kid become a rock star, lost old friends, wavered in relevance, and wondered if he cared about any of it anymore at all. The extra grain in his voice, the lessons of his words, the disorienting blur of his band: It is the sublimated sound of actual pain, lived and analyzed and announced in songs that show you exactly how dark the world can get.</p><p>Time Out of Mind feels like the antithesis of our pervasive need to have an opinion about everything all the time. It is a reflection on a life lived, not a reaction to someone else's ideas. There's a place for both, as Dylan's own brash, youthful songs made clear a half-century ago. The difference is one of insight, of 55 years of life slowly distilled into wisdom. Everything won't be alright, but desolation can be its own unlikely source of triumph. Dylan had a grief that gave him nowhere to go but the grave—or, as he did, onward.</p><p>— <strong>Grayson Haver Currin</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Love And Theft | <p>Time Out of Mind was a legitimate comeback, Bob Dylan's first collection of original songs in nearly ten years and a risky rumination on mortality, but its sequel, Love and Theft, is his true return to form, not just his best album since Blood on the Tracks, but the loosest, funniest, warmest record he's made since The Basement Tapes. There are none of the foreboding, apocalyptic warnings that permeated Time Out of Mind and even underpinned "Things Have Changed," his Oscar-winning theme to Curtis Hanson's 2000 film Wonder Boys. Just as important, Daniel Lanois' deliberately arty, diffuse production has retreated into the mist, replaced by an uncluttered, resonant production that gives Dylan and his ace backing band room to breathe. And they run wild with that liberty, rocking the house with the grinding "Lonesome Day Blues" and burning it down with the fabulously swinging "Summer Days." They're equally captivating on the slower songs, whether it's the breezily romantic "Bye and Bye," the torch song "Moonlight," or the epic reflective closer, "Sugar Baby." Musically, Dylan hasn't been this natural or vital since he was with the Band, and even then, those records were never as relaxed and easy or even as hard-rocking as these. That alone would make Love and Theft a remarkable achievement, but they're supported by a tremendous set of songs that fully synthesize all the strands in his music, from the folksinger of the early '60s, through the absurdist storyteller of the mid-'60s, through the traditionalist of the early '70s, to the grizzled professional of the '90s. None of this is conscious, it's all natural. There's an ease to his writing and a swagger to his performance unheard in years -- he's cracking jokes and murmuring wry asides, telling stories, crooning, and swinging. It's reminiscent of his classic records, but he's never made a record that's been such sheer, giddy fun as this, and it stands proudly among his very best albums.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | The Essential Bob Dylan | <p>A double-disc set released for the holiday season of 2000, The Essential Bob Dylan is a fine choice for the casual listener that just wants all the songs they know on one collection -- it's Dylan's equivalent of Beatles One. Outside of the remastering and the previously non-LP (and very good) "Things Have Changed," there's nothing here for collectors, but, then again, that's not who this was designed for. This collection is for the listener that wants "Blowin' in the Wind," "Like a Rolling Stone," "All Along the Watchtower," "Quinn the Eskimo," "Lay Lady Lay," and "Tangled Up in Blue" in one tidy place. Yes, it's easy to find great songs missing, but for those casual fans, and for those looking for a fairly comprehensive yet concise entry point, The Essential Bob Dylan comes close to living up to its title.</p><p>The Australian version has six extra cuts.</p><p>— <b>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Modern Times | <p>When Bob Dylan dropped Time Out of Mind in 1997, it was a rollicking rockabilly and blues record, full of sad songs about mortality, disappointment, and dissolution. 2001 brought Love and Theft, which was also steeped in stomping blues and other folk forms. It was funny, celebratory in places and biting in others. Dylan has been busy since then: he did a Victoria's Secret commercial, toured almost nonstop, was in a couple films -- Larry Charles' Masked and Anonymous and Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home -- and published the first of a purported three volumes of his cagey, rambling autobiography, Chronicles. Lately, he's been thinking about Alicia Keys. This last comment comes from the man himself in "Thunder on the Mountain," the opening track on Modern Times, a barn-burning, raucous, and unruly blues tune that finds the old man sounding mighty feisty and gleefully agitated: "I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys/Couldn't keep from cryin'/She was born in Hell's Kitchen and I was livin' down the line/I've been lookin' for her even clear through Tennessee." The drums shuffle with brushes, the piano is pumping like Jerry Lee Lewis, the bass is popping, and a slide guitar that feels like it's calling the late Michael Bloomfield back from 1966 -- à la Highway 61 Revisited -- slips in and out of the ether like a ghost wanting to emerge in the flesh. Dylan's own choppy leads snarl in the break and he's letting his blues fall down like rain: "Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches/I'll recruit my army from the orphanages/ I've been to St. Herman's church and said my religious vows/I sucked the milk out of a thousand cows/I got the pork chop, she got the pie/She ain't no angel and neither am I...I did all I could/I did it right there and then/I've already confessed I don't need to confess again."</p><p>Thus begins the third part of Dylan's renaissance trilogy (thus far, y'all). Modern Times is raw; it feels live, immediate, and in places even shambolic. Rhythms slip, time stretches and turns back on itself, and lyrics are rushed to fit into verses that just won't stop coming. Dylan produced the set himself under his Jack Frost moniker. Its songs are humorous and cryptic, tender and snarling. What's he saying? We don't need to concern ourselves with that any more than we had to Willie Dixon talking about backdoor men or Elmore James dusting his broom. Dylan's blues are primitive and impure. Though performed by a crackerjack band, they're played with fury; the singer wrestles down musical history as he spits in the eye of the modern world. But blues isn't the only music here. There are parlor songs such as "Spirit on the Water," where love is as heavenly and earthly a thing as exists in this life. The band swings gently and carefree, with Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball playing slippery -- and sometimes sloppy -- jazz chords as Tony Garnier's bass and George Receli's sputtering snare walk the beat. Another, "When the Deal Goes Down," tempts the listener into thinking that Dylan is aping Bing Crosby in his gravelly, snake-rattle voice. True, he's an unabashed fan of the old arch mean-hearted crooner. But it just ain't Bing, because it's got that true old-time swing.</p><p>Dylan's singing style in these songs comes from the great blues and jazzman Lonnie Johnson (whose version of the Grosz and Coslow standard "Tomorrow Night" he's been playing for years in his live set). If you need further proof, look to Johnson's last recordings done in the late '50s and early '60s ("I Found a Dream" and "I'll Get Along Somehow"), or go all the way back to the early years for "Secret Emotions," and "In Love Again," cut in 1940. It is in these songs where you will find the heart of Dylan's sweet song ambition and also that unique phrasing that makes him one of the greatest blues singers and interpreters ever. Dylan evokes Muddy Waters in "Rollin' and Tumblin." He swipes the riff, the title, the tune itself, and uses some of the words and adds a whole bunch of his own. Same with his use of Sleepy John Estes in "Someday Baby".. Those who think Dylan merely plagiarizes miss the point. Dylan is a folk musician; he uses American folk forms such as blues, rock, gospel, and R&B as well as lyrics, licks, and/or whatever else he can to get a song across. This tradition of borrowing and retelling goes back to the beginning of song and story. Even the title of Modern Times is a wink-eye reference to a film by Charlie Chaplin. It doesn't make Dylan less; it makes him more, because he contains all of these songs within himself. By his use of them, he adds to their secret histories and labyrinthine legends. Besides, he's been around long enough to do anything he damn well pleases and has been doing so since the beginning.</p><p>Modern Times expresses emotions and comments upon everything from love ("When the Deal Goes Down," "Beyond the Horizon") to mortality ("The Levee's Gonna Break," "Ain't Talkin") to the state of the world -- check "Workingman's Blues #2," where Dylan sings gently about the "buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down/Money's getting shallow and weak...they say low wages are reality if we want to compete abroad." But in the next breath he's put his "cruel weapons on the shelf" and invites his beloved to sit on his knee. It's a poignant midtempo ballad that walks the line between the topical songs of Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie to the love songs of Stephen Foster and Leadbelly. One can feel both darkness and light struggling inside the singer for dominance. But in his carnal and spiritual imagery and rakish honesty, he doesn't give in to either side and walks the hardest path -- the "long road down" to his own destiny. This is a storyteller, a pilgrim who's seen it all; he's found it all wanting; he's found some infinitesimal take on the truth that he's holding on to with a vengeance. In the midst of changes that are foreboding, Modern Times is the sound of an ambivalent Psalter coming in from the storm, dirty, bloodied, but laughing at himself -- because he knows nobody will believe him anyway.</p><p>Dylan digs deep into the pocket of American song past in "Nettie Moore," a 19th century tune from which he borrowed the title, the partial melody, and first line of its chorus. He also uses words by W.C. Handy and Robert Johnson as he extends the meaning of the tome by adding his own metaphorical assets/images and wry observations. However, even as the song is from antiquity, it's full of the rest of Modern Times bemusement. "The Levee's Gonna Break" shakes and shimmies as it warns about the coming catastrophe. Coming as it does on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it's a particularly poignant number that reveals apocalypse and redemption and rails on the greedy and powerful as it parties in the gutter. There are no sacred cows -- when Dylan evokes Carl Perkins' exhortation to put "your cat clothes on," it's hard not to stomp around maniacally even as you feel his righteousness come through. The great irony is in the final track, "Ain't Talkin'," where a lonesome fiddle, piano, and hand percussion spill out a gypsy ballad that states a yearning, that amounts to an unsatisfied spiritual hunger. The pilgrim wanders, walks, and aspires to do good unto others, though he falters often -- he sometimes even wants to commit homicide. It's all part of the "trawl" of living in the world today. Dylan's simmering growl adds a sense of apprehension, of whistling through the graveyard, with determination to get to he knows not where -- supposedly it's the other side of the world. The guitar interplay with the fiddle comes through loud and clear in the bittersweet tune. It's like how "Beyond the Horizon" uses gypsy melodies and swing to tenderly underscore the seriousness in the words. It sends the album off with a wry sense of foreboding. This pilgrim is sticking to the only thing he knows is solid -- the motion of his feet.</p><p>Modern Times portrays a new weird America, even stranger than the old one, because it's merely part of a world consumed by insanity. In these ten songs, bawdy joy, restless heartache, a wild sense of humor, and bottomless sadness all coexist and inform one another as a warning and celebration of this precious human life while wondering openly about what comes after. This world view is expressed through musical and lyrical forms that are threatened with extinction: old rickety blues that still pack an electrically charged wallop, porch and parlor tunes, and pop ballads that could easily have come straight from the 1930s via the 1890s, but it also wails and roars the blues. Modern Times is the work of a professional mythmaker, a back-alley magician, and a prophetic creator of mischief. He knows his characters because he's been them all and can turn them all inside out in song: the road-worn holy man who's also a thief; the tender-hearted lover who loves to brawl; the poetic sage who's also a pickpocket; and the Everyman who embodies them all and just wants to get on with it. On Modern Times, all bets are off as to who finishes the race dead last, because that's the most interesting place to be: "Meet me at the bottom, don't lag behind/Bring me my boots and shoes/You can hang back or fight your best on the frontline/Sing a little bit of these workingman blues." There is nothing so intriguing as contradiction and Dylan offers it with knowing laughter and tears, because in his songs he displays that they are both sides of the same coin and he never waffles, because he's on the other side of the looking glass. Modern Times is the work of an untamed artist who, as he grows older, sees mortality as something to accept but not bow down to, the sound that refuses to surrender to corruption of the soul and spirit. It's more than a compelling listen; it's a convincing one.</p><p>— <strong>Thom Jurek</strong></p><hr/><hr/><p>As an artist and a conundrum, Bob Dylan is well-versed in semi-hysterical critical hyperbole. With each new record since 1997's stellar Time Out of Mind, music writers and editors have been tripping all over themselves trying to sputter out the best, most dramatic encapsulation of Dylan's rebirth (which, given the relative late-career flops of his peers and his own 1980s shitstorm, still seems strange and thrilling). Now, 45 years into a perfectly studied, over-anthologized, well-chronicled career, even talking about the cult-of-Dylan seems clichéd: Analysis of Dylan-love, Dylan-backlash, Dylan-histrionics, and Dylanology is moot. Books have been published, academic treatises have been defended, documentaries have been ordered and directed, cover stories have been savored and parsed-- but every time Bob Dylan cranks out a new record, we still try, again, to figure out what it all adds up to.</p><p>Modern Times is Bob Dylan's 31st studio LP, and an obvious companion piece to 2001's Love and Theft, offering new tracks of jazz-inspired, rockabilly-scamming, ragtime-aping rock'n'roll, more heavily indebted to blues and honky-tonk than Woody Guthrie and Folkways. The record does little to persuade disbelievers, will continue to infuriate those who cheered when Pete Seeger jerked the plug at Newport, and isn't entirely unfamiliar: Anyone who's seen Dylan play in the past five years will recognize the silhouette here, hunched over a keyboard, all crags and angles, brambles of hair puffing out from under a big black hat, pencil mustache combed into place, pounding keys, infinitely more compelled by his fellow players than his sycophantic audience. Unsurprisingly, Modern Times is musically intricate, thick, and expertly played, more the product of a well-rehearsed-- but still gorgeously mellow-- band than an auteur. It also contains some of the softest, funniest, and most charming songs of Dylan's late career, as he snickers to himself, cooing about love, God, and doing it ("I got the pork chops/ She got the pie").</p><p>Dylan recently spat a series of (now-notoriously) curmudgeonly comments to Jonathan Lethem in Rolling Stone, pining that nothing sounds like shellac-- and while his complaints seemed depressingly stodgy, they were also promptly misconstrued and yanked out of context; as it were, Dylan was deriding contemporary production/studio techniques and not the whole of modern music, which becomes instantly and weirdly obvious to anyone who listens to the lyrics to raucous opener "Thunder on the Mountain" ("I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn't help from crying/ When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line/ I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be/ I been looking for her even clean through Tennessee"), or considers the fact that Dylan produced this record himself (under favored stage-name Jack Frost).</p><p>Still, it's obvious that Dylan's most beloved songs are old ones, and he borrows gleefully from Nina Simone, Memphis Minnie, Carl Perkins, Muddy Waters, and, in the grand tradition of AP Carter and John Lomax, plenty of unnamed songwriters whose work long ago slipped into public domain. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (Muddy Waters famously recorded the song in 1950, but its origins date back to at least 1929) is given a new workup, infused with Dylan's signature clatter and wheeze and punched up with peppery guitar and even spicier lyrics ("I got trouble so hard, I just can't stand this dream/ Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains"). Meanwhile, "Nettie Moore" (a well-worn 19th century ballad) is staggering, a spare blend of vocals and light, airy instrumentation, Dylan's decaying pipes tut-tutting sweet proclamations of love: "When you're around me/ All my grief gives way/ A lifetime with you is like some heavenly day/ Everything I've ever known to be right has been proven wrong." "Workingman's Blues 2" is similarly gentle and lapping, and "The Levee's Gonna Break", with its familiar Zeppelin-via-Memphis-Minnie refrain ("If it keeps on raining/ The levee's gonna break"), seems almost self-referential ("I paid my time/ And now I'm as good as new…Some of these people are gonna strip you of all they can take").</p><p>The biggest disappointment here is that Modern Times is probably Dylan's least-surprising release in decades-- it's the logical continuation of its predecessor, created with the same band he's been touring with for years, fed from familiar influences, and sprinkled with all the droll, anachronistic bits now long-expected. Dylan's voice, sinking further into grit, is all wheeze and mew, rolled in salt but still instantly recognizable. And now that he's eyebrows-deep in the rock'n'roll canon, maybe the heart-stopping appeal of Bob Dylan has less to do with his output-- which, tangentially, remains outstanding-- and more to do with his cowboy boot-saunter. Maybe we all want a little bit of Dylan's superhuman restraint, and whether it's real or brutally calculated doesn't actually matter: The fuck-off detachment, the unconcerned genius, the squinty-eyed disdain, the arid, gut-punching humor, the total (if feigned) disinterest in his growing superhero status. He's the boy who doesn't love us back, the one everyone yearns for, the Holy Grail, the last American hero.</p><p>— <strong>Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Dave Edmunds | Twangin' | |
| Walter Egan | Not Shy | |
| Duke Ellington | Greatest Hits | |
| Emerson String Quartet | Haydn: String Quartets Op. 51 - Seven Last Words |
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