The New York Times
Bob Dylanâs voice isnât getting any prettier. At 71, on his 35th studio album, âTempestâ â" and a full 50 years after he released his debut album in 1962 â" Mr. Dylan sings in a wheezy rasp that proudly scrapes up against its own flaws. That voice can be almost avuncular, the wry cackle of a codger who still has an eye for the ladies. But it can also be calmly implacable or utterly bleak, and itâs completely believable when Mr. Dylan sings, in âNarrow Way,â âIâm armed to the hilt, and Iâm struggling hard/You wonât get out of here unscarred.â
The songs on âTempestâ are written for that voice alone â" one that can switch from memory to prophecy, from joke to threat, and from romance to carnage within a line or two.
Mr. Dylanâs previous studio album, âTogether Through Life,â from 2009, kept a kindly twinkle through most of its songs, which Mr. Dylan wrote with the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. âTempest,â like that album, was produced by Mr. Dylan (billed as Jack Frost) and played with his road band, joined by David Hidalgo, from Los Lobos, on instruments including accordion and fiddle; it includes one more Dylan-Hunter song, âDuquesne Whistle.â
Like Mr. Dylanâs other 21st-century albums, âTempestâ feels live and rootsy, vamping along in the zone where blues, country and folk intersect. But 8 of the 10 songs on âTempestâ stretch past five minutes, turning into down-home incantations. The album starts with a deceptively genial whiff of yesteryear; the opening of âDuquesne Whistleâ sounds like a western swing disc from the 1930s before it fills out to a more modern recording style, and its lyrics romanticize a train whistle, âblowinâ like my womanâs on board.â
Next comes âSoon After Midnight,â a 1950s-flavored slow dance that moves from droll easy rhymes (âA gal named Honey/Took my moneyâ) to something more bullheaded (âIâm in no hurry/Iâm not afraid of your furyâ) before winding up as a love song.
But âTempestâ grows far darker and surlier. Sometimes in oracular free associations, sometimes in terse narrative, Mr. Dylan has a lot on his mind: women, class, journeys, power, the inscrutable will of God and the omnipresence of death.
By the end of âTempest,â he has sung about murder and suicide in the grim love triangle âTin Angel,â a massacre in âEarly Roman Kingsâ and the killing of John Lennon in âRoll On, Johnâ (which, sentiment aside, is the albumâs clunker). The title song on âTempestâ is a 14-minute chronicle of the 1912 sinking of the âTitanic,â in a Celtic-country waltz with 45 telegraphic verses:
They battened down the hatches
But the hatches wouldnât hold
They drowned upon the staircase
Of brass and polished gold.
The allusive Mr. Dylan looks back to both an old Carter Family song, âThe Titanicâ (also a waltz that mentions a watchman), and to the blockbuster 1997 film.
Mr. Dylan builds songs around scraps and nuggets of the past: a Mississippi Sheiks refrain in the existential country-blues âNarrow Way,â the stop-time riff of Muddy Watersâs âMannish Boyâ in âEarly Roman Kings,â bits of the traditional ballad âBarbara Allenâ and phrases from John Greenleaf Whittier poems in âScarlet Town.â From such shards Mr. Dylan constructs his own archetypal realms: âIn Scarlet Town, you fight your fatherâs foes/Up on the hill, a chilly wind blows,â he sings, over a rustic dirge.
âPay in Bloodâ harks back to the midtempo, mid-1960s Dylan of âJust Like Tom Thumbâs Bluesâ (give or take the new songâs pedal steel guitar). But itâs a manifesto of Mr. Dylan now: grim, wrathful, tenacious.
Night after night, day after day
They strip your useless hopes away
The more I take the more I give
The more I die the more I live.
He sings forcefully, in a raspy, phlegmy bark thatâs not exactly melodic and by no means welcoming. Battered and unforgiving, heâs still Bob Dylan, answerable to no one but himself.
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