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On Tuesday, Bob Dylan's new album "Modern Times" hits the shelves, and it is getting some of the best reviews of any album over the past 25 years. Some critics have gone as far to say that it may be his best work ever. Personally I find it hrad to believe that this new album could be his best ever considering he has 3 classic albums in his back pocket; Blood on the Tracks, Blond on Blond and Highway 61 and a fourth which was great also, Nashville Skyline. Along with a ton of other great work.
Dylan him self has admitted he hasn't made what he considers a great album in 20 plus years so, I think it is a matter of the bar of great music being lowered overall rather than the new album being a classsic with his others.
With that said I will say that this is a great record, their is a classic Dylan appeal to it but at the same time has flavors of Jazz and Blues to a few songs, and is not typical of a lot of new recordings. The album has a excellent flow and for me a Dylan fan is a midnight or early morning buy but I think it great listen for anyone who appreciates quality.
Here is a link to listen to the entire album all week until Sunday the 3rd or before you buy it....
http://music.aol.com/songs/new_releases_full_cds
Here are a couple of early reviews...
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/...0/modern_timesThe new Dylan album starts with the voice of God in the mountains and the sound of pistols in the streets. Bad things are happening, and the ladies in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to get out of town. Dylan has ladies on his mind, too-- Alicia Keys, who's forty years younger than he is yet worth chasing through the Tennessee Hills just the same, but also good women who do just what you say, and the wicked women who drain your heart and mind. War and love are in the air. It's time to get right with the Lord, maybe go back up north and try his hand at farming. But the pitchfork is on the shelf. The hammer is on the table. And from the sound of things, the hammer is coming down.
That's "Thunder on the Mountain," the first song on Modern Times, Dylan's thirty-first studio record and his third straight masterwork. Modern Times was cut in New York over the course of a little more than a month with Dylan's road band, which had a mere 113 shows of the Never Ending Tour under its belt. The songs are almost evenly divided between blues ready-mades, old-timey two-steps and stately marches full of prophecy. The band--seasoned by night after night of responding to the spontaneous reinvention that makes Dylan's shows the longest-running miracle in rock & roll--jumps at the master's call, bringing rockabilly twang, Chicago street muscle, cowboy swing or le jazz hot languor. In sound and feel, Modern Times recalls the kind of music working bands--Muddy Waters' bluesmen or Hank Williams' Drifting Cowboys--would cut on the fly between gigs, a mixture of unique inventions and variations on hand-me-downs touched by the leader's genius. Almost every song retraces the American journey from the country to the city, when folkways were giving way to modern times. The mood is America on the brink--of mechanization, of war, of domestic tranquillity, of fulfilling its promise and of selling its dreams one by one for cash on the barrelhead.
Since even before he asked for permission to forget about today until tomorrow, Dylan has said that time means nothing to him. During the past ten years, he has been making music that shows just this. There is no precedent in rock & roll for the territory Dylan is now opening with albums that stand alongside the accomplishments of his wild youth. Love and Theft, recorded when he'd turned sixty, was his toughest guitar rock since Blonde on Blonde in 1966, a combination of the mojo Muddy Waters had working at age sixty-two on Hard Again and the sweeping dystopic perspective Philip Roth brought to American Pastoral at sixty-three (with more than a touch of Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life).
Modern Times is something different. It's less terrifying, less funny on first listen. But it has more command, more clarity. There is none of the digital murk of Time Out of Mind, and the snakebite live sound of Love and Theft has softened. This music is relaxed; it has nothing to prove. It is music of accumulated knowledge, it knows every move, anticipates every step before you take it. Producing himself for the second time running, Dylan has captured the sound of tradition as an ever-present, a sound he's been working on since his first album, in 1962. (One reason Modern Times is so good is that Dylan has been making it so long.) These songs stand alongside their sources and are meant to, which is why their sources are so obvious, so direct: "Rollin' and Tumblin' " gives a cowboy gallop and new lyrics to Muddy Waters' 1950 hit of the same name (with its own history dating back to at least 1929); "Someday Baby" mellow-downs Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips"; "The Levee's Gonna Break" jumps off from Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks"; "Nettie Moore" lifts a line from a nineteenth-century ballad recorded by the Sons of the Pioneers; and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" motivates "Thunder on the Mountain."
"Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air," Dylan tells his lady on "When the Deal Goes Down." "Tomorrow keeps turning around/We live and we die, we know not why/But I'll be with you when the deal goes down." The forces of divine reckoning and mortal love are everywhere on Modern Times. It all piles up in "Thunder on the Mountain": devotion, lust, the second coming, earthly troubles. The language is plain-spoken, pared down: "Feel like my soul is beginning to expand/Look into my heart and you will sort of understand/You brought me here, now you're trying to run me away/The writing's on the wall, come read it, come see what it say." In the dance-hall ballad "Spirit on the Water," Dylan invokes God's creation of the heavens and Earth to describe his sweetheart's face. There's divine reckoning here, too, though: "I wanna be with you in paradise, and it seems so unfair/I can't go back to paradise no more/I killed a man back there."
And that's one of the idyllic songs--Modern Times has plenty of love laments that turn into apocalyptic meditations. "Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains," Dylan sings in "Rollin' and Tumblin'." Then darkness falls: "The night's filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom/I've been conjuring up all these long-dead souls from their crumblin' tombs." Dylan speaks as a preacher, a lover and a general at the same time, as though every song he'd ever recorded were coming together into one. Modern Times is the second straight album on which Dylan has invoked the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It is inevitable to read "The Levee's Gonna Break"--with its "people on the road . . . carrying everything that they own"-- in light of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, just as it was impossible to hear Love and Theft's "High Water" on September 12th, 2001, the day after its release, without thinking of the World Trade Center. But neither song is that simple. Both describe the end times Dylan has seen coming since his second album. Both suggest sex or love as an alternative. "The Levee's Gonna Break," though, has an odd promise of redemption Ð the river brings not just death and destruction but baptism and rebirth. The Great Mississippi Flood, along with the Charlie Chaplin movie from which the album takes its name and the Book of Revelations, form a triangle of tragedy, comedy and prophecy in which Modern Times unfolds.
And then at the end, we are somewhere near the gates of Eden. "Ain't Talkin'," the album closer, has the hard-boiled moralism of a Raymond Chandler novel. The setting is the Mystic Garden. One night a man goes out walking. Someone hits him from behind. There are no rules here. The gardener is gone. And in this godless place, where the cities of the plague run with hog-eyed grease, this lone man looks to avenge his father's death and looks to his mother for guidance: "In the human heart, an evil spirit can dwell/I'm trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others/But, oh, mother, things ain't going well." His eyes are filled with tears. His lips are dry. His mind is clogged with thoughts of a girl he left behind. He carries a dead man's shield and waits for his enemies to sleep so he can slaughter them. "Ain't talkin', just walkin'/I'll burn that bridge before you can cross/Heart burnin', still yearnin'/There'll be no mercy for you once you've lost." He walks up the road, around the bend, bound for "the last outback, at the world's end." His music trails behind him. And then he's out of sight.
JOE LEVY
http://www.villagevoice.com/music/06...,74230,22.htmlGet Busy Living
The moans on Dylan's latest aren't exactly of the morbid death-rattle variety
by Rob Harvilla
August 21st, 2006 3:53 PM
"The elderly have so much to offer, sir. They're our link with history."
"I don't want to be your goddamn link, damn you. I want to feel Floris's naked thighs against my own."
"I wonder how long I'm gonna live sometimes."
"Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains."
The first two quotes are from the film Being John Malkovich. (The second is a 105-year-old discussing his secretary). The third is a Tom Petty confession recently slapped on the cover of some magazine. And the fourth, well, that's Bob Dylan, not wondering how long he's gonna live, and certainly not being our damn link. Bob spends very little of Modern Times—his latest, out next Tuesday—wallowing in fate/mortality issues. Instead he hits on Alicia Keys, says vaguely offensive and/or vaguely charming things to a host of other nameless ladies, and boasts, "I sucked the milk out of a thousand cows" with his eye firmly trained on bovine future, not bovine past. Yikes.
"You think I'm over the hill," he croaks warmly. "Think I'm past my prime/Let me see what you got/We can have a whompin' good time." A whompin' good time. Whompin'. Then he plays a little harmonica. Good times.
This ribald vivacity frankly bothers me. I prefer my rock icons of a certain age to be croaking, quavering, terrified twilighters with barely enough strength left to even knock on heaven's door. I have a weakness for Holy Shit I'm Dying records, be they wry and winking like Warren Zevon's or deadly serious and soul-crushing like Johnny Cash's. You can argue that the American series, brutally grinding to a halt this summer with American V: A Hundred Highways, laid the death porn vibe on way too thick—track one: "Help Me"—but it was equally excruciating and exhilarating throughout to watch Johnny show professional mopers like Trent Reznor and so forth what real pain really sounds like, even if much of it was theater.
But all this has left me with a taste for cheesy, exploitative on-my-deathbed martyrdom, and Bob's having none of it. He already made that record a decade ago: 1997's Time Out of Mind, my favorite Dylan album period, lushly produced blasts of earthly lament and heavenly yearning climaxing with the mighty "Not Dark Yet," swoony and grandiose as Bob drops his guard and lets his long eeeeeeees and aaaaaaaas flail wildly as he admits, "It's not dark yet/But it's gettin' there."
Nine years later he's making googly-eyes at random r&b divas. "I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys," he growls on Modern Times' opener "Thunder on the Mountain," and barely elaborates. Is this lust? Professional admiration? A cheap tabloid ploy? Anyone expecting concrete statements of intent of any kind will walk away frustrated. "The Levee's Gonna Break" is a bit too cheeky and amorphous a blues romp to justify employing that image on an album released in late August 2006, and his widely parodied wheeeyyyyy whooooaaaa vocal tics are mostly reined in, strategically deployed either as defiance ("I ain't nobody's houseboy/I ain't nobody's well- traiiined maiiiiiid") or as a way of deflating any potentially sweeping cultural statements ("Everybody got to wonder what's the matter with this gllllrrrrrhhhhh today.")
You can certainly understand Bob's preference not to tackle the
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gllllrrrrrhhhhh head-on, but it leaves Modern Times accomplished, consistently pretty, occasionally poignant, but ultimately weirdly vague, a government report with the juiciest details blacked out. And—to his, your, and, oh, I guess probably my benefit—he avoids Holy Shit I'm Dying grandstanding. His nostalgic malaise on the plinky piano ballad "Workingman's Blues 2" is born of exhaustion, not entropy, and when he announces, "Sleeping's like a temporary death," he's just sneering at the Great Beyond like Nas did. The gentle gypsy swing of "Beyond the Horizon" is mere pillow talk. So's the big waltz "When the Deal Goes Down," on which Bob vows he and his latest bovine will bow out together, but it's a future as distant and hypothetical as Paul McCartney writing "When I'm 64" as a teenager. (Gorgeous tune, though.) The faster, gnarlier blues-rock tunes are just all right, built to be admired but not compulsively replayed, a fair-enough chance for Bob to go "Rollin' and Tumblin'," as is evidently still his wont. Nothing here is as goofy or gleefully hostile as the splendid last half of 2001's Love and Theft, and Time Out of Mind is out of sight. Too bad.
But maybe there's a third path for records of this sort, splitting the difference between laying prostrate at death's door and kicking it down in indifference or disdain: Sound, act, and look like death itself. Which brings us to the rock icon of a certain age whose late period is vastly preferable to Bob's: Tom Waits, whose 1999 record Mule Variations mauls anything Bob/Neil/Elvis/whoever has whipped up since . . . Vietnam? Gulf War I, certainly. God, just go back for "House Where Nobody Lives" and stay for the rest—scarier, funnier, sweeter, more brutal, more honest, just more, often caked in layers of creep-show makeup but still naked and direct, delivered in a pulverized voice that makes Dylan sound like Morrissey and can't be reined in under any circumstances, for effect or affectation. Of course Waits's recent, charmingly random, NYC-spurning mini-tour won't catapult him back into the public eye the way Modern Times will Dylan, but it reminds Tom devotees he's still quietly better, politely on record but bombastically onstage, gregarious and gruesome beneath horror movie lighting and backed by a gloriously unhinged gore-jazz combo that breathes fresh zombie breath into death marches old and new.
Consider "Day After Tomorrow," off Tom's last record, 2004's Real Gone, hiding amid perhaps a few too many corny carnival barker nightmares (titles like "Don't Go Into the Barn" etc.) with a shockingly vivid soldier's plea for survival, a whole other world of Holy Shit I'm Dying, painted in quiet tones gorgeous and mournful and beyond belief. I wish Bob Dylan still wrote songs like that. He undoubtedly can. If he'd written that particular one it would've triggered laudatory press orders of magnitude greater than any half-assed paean to Alicia Keys. It's ridiculous to expect him to play along with my bizarre deathbed-lament fetish, but for a guy who ascended to greatness by violently accosting the gllllrrrrrhhhhh of the world, we sure could use his opinion on it now. He's our link with history.
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Originally Posted by Steve
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