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Written by Jesse Jarnow
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Thursday, 12 October 2006 |
Bob Dylan
Modern Times
Columbia
By now, you’ve either acquired Bob Dylan’s Modern Times or you haven’t. It’s pretty good. Really. Those who dug the swinging jump blues of 2001’s Love and Theft will have few complaints, another in a long line of Dylan sequels. As with each of his recent albums, Dylan’s voice is his most spectacularly gnarled yet, like the roots of a vast tree. On gorgeous ballads like “When the Deal Goes Down” and “Beyond the Horizon,” a lilting Hawaiian crooner, each word has its own texture, each breath disintegrating and reconstructing.
The latter’s arrangement economically suggests Dylan fronting a ‘40s-style pop orchestra (which would be a boss move, too). Working with song forms that sound lifted from an excavated jukebox, and musicians that recall the house band for a forgotten regional label, the pleasure is in how well Dylan sells it all. “Thunder on the Mountain” bounces with an infectious internal rhythm. “Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons-of-bitches,” Dylan sings, crunching syllables, “I’m recruitin’ my army from the old religions.” In places, though, Dylan sounds less a weirdo doomsayer than a crank, his mask cracking. “They say low wages are re-al-i-tee, if we want to compete abroad,” he croons in a bit of Mellencampy heartlandishness on “Workingman’s Blues #2” (Or maybe it’s the IWW anthem Dylan was supposed to write in the ‘60s.) And if Dylan covering “The Levee’s Gonna Break” seems overly obvious, duh. These are modern times and it’s a contemporary tune-plus, predictability or no, it makes a nice inverted bookend with 2001’s prophetic “High Water (For Charley Patton).” Still, there’s plenty to chew on (why does Dylan keep mentioning brains?), and it might be a few years before the next course. Eat slowly. Jesse Jarnow
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Last Updated ( Monday, 08 January 2007 )
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