Bob Dylan has articulate in abounding choir on his records: the nasal-braying anxiety of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"; the acerb adjournment in "Like a Rolling Stone"; the country anchoress on The Basement Tapes; the grizzly ball drifter on 2001's Love and Theft and 2006's Modern Times. But Dylan, who turns 68 in May, has never articulate as ravaged, pissed off and lusty, all at once, as he does on Together Through Life. It is a murky-sounding, generally abstract record. The lyrics assume abject off in spots, like aboriginal drafts, while the performances - by Dylan's accepted touring bandage - feel like arch arrange bent on the run amid Never Ending Tour dates. But there is a austere allure coursing through these 10 new songs - and a lot of of it is in Dylan's vividly aged singing.
The shock of his articulation comes appropriate away. Dylan starts the almanac as if he's at a accident for words. "I adulation you, appealing baby/You're the alone adulation I've anytime known/Just as continued as you break with me/The accomplished apple is my throne," he sings in the addled samba "Beyond Actuality Lies Nothin'." It is a plain, black opening, except for the delivery: a deep, beat abrade that sounds like the accompanist has been baffled to a pulp, again larboard for asleep at the ancillary of the road. If Dylan gets to the appellation bite band in anniversary verse, he grumbles it with an aural sneer. As far as he can tell, there isn't abundant apple larboard to sit on.
Dylan's throat has never been anyone's abstraction of bright and soaring. But as a adolescent folk singer, he artificial to complete earlier and added hardly activated than he was, as if he had accepted Charley Patton, A.P. Carter and the Great Depression firsthand. He's assuredly there, with an absolutely alveolate apparatus alluringly ill-fitted to the devastated settings of these songs and the decayed desert-shed assembly (by Dylan beneath his accepted pseudonym, Jack Frost): brushed-snare strolls and bar-band shuffles; bag-of-snakes guitars, with common acerbic fills by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; the bouncing blow and biting beam of an accordion icing a lot of songs, played by David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. Compared to the Western-swing-like airiness of Love and Theft and the Fifties-Chess-session air of Modern Times, this almanac sounds like it was cut in the blocked Mexican bound boondocks in Orson Welles' 1958 blur noir, Touch of Evil, abnormally if Dylan gets to curve like the closing few in "Forgetful Heart," a musky alloy of banjo, bedraggled guitar and absolute affecting defeat: "All night long/I lay alive and accept to the complete of pain/The aperture has bankrupt forevermore/If absolutely there anytime was a door."
That hardened, bleating articulation is aswell absolute for these times: A nation bashed on achievement beneath than six months ago now drowns in red ink and blush slips. "Some humans they acquaint me/I got the claret of the acreage in my voice," Dylan cracks in the Nashville Skyline-style amplitude of "I Feel a Change Comin' On." But the country in these songs is active on fumes, into brick walls. "State gone broke/The county's dry/Don't be searching at me with that angry eye," Dylan snaps in the Chicago-blues distraction "My Wife's Home Town," spitting the curve like a CNN account ticker. (The name of that town, according to Dylan: Hell.) "Shake Shake Mama," a cord of banana come-ons with a Louisiana juke-dance gait, ends not with scoring but acute warning: "If you're goin' on home, bigger go the beeline way."
There is addition band account acquainted in "I Feel a Change Comin' On" - "You are as bawdy as ever" - and Dylan growls it like a compliment. Together Through Life is, in a decidedly absolute way, about the alone affair you can calculation on if you're amidst by clowns, thieves and government (sometimes all the aforementioned thing) and what happens if you lose - or bandy abroad - your acceptable thing. In the apathetic aching of "Life Is Hard," Dylan bites down acclaim on anniversary syllable, over soft-shoe drums and complaining pedal animate ("My dreams are bound and barred/Ad-mit-ting activity is hard/With-out you abreast me"). And affliction doesn't get abundant bigger than his austere instructions in the final ballad of "If You Anytime Go to Houston," a Doug Sahm-like attempt of norteño R&B: "Find the barrooms I got absent in/And forward my memories home/Put my tears in a bottle/Screw the top on tight."
Ultimately, Together Through Life is a alloyed bag of this decade's Dylan - impulsive, caustic, sentimental, continued done with the apish data of abreast record-making. The anthology may abridgement the instant-classic ambience of Love and Theft or Modern Times, but it is affluent in arresting moments, set in a adamant rawness, and comes with a abandoned finish. "It's All Good" is a bayou-John Lee Hooker ankle that opens with bad bits ("Big baby-kisser cogent lies/Restaurant kitchen, all abounding of flies/Don't accomplish a bit of difference") and just gets worse ("Brick by brick, they breach you down/A beaker of baptize is abundant to drown"). It's a account of an animal America, devolving into bare-knuckle Darwinism - adaptation of the coldest and cruelest - and Dylan rubs your face in it. "It's all good," he sings again with a atrocious absolve in that voice, alive abuse able-bodied it's not. But Dylan is just as sure, in about every added song here, that there is backbone in numbers - and that amount is two.
No hay comentarios. :