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The new Dylan album

I now we have a lot of Dylanites on here - what do you think.
Think i need a couple of more listens but Murder Most Foul is amazing.
Ed Sheeran it aint ...

Comments

  • I've got it - but haven't listened to the whole of Murder Most Foul yet...  The first CD though is amazing and his voice, as raspy as it is (well he is 79...) somehow works with the material.
  • It is a sensational album, unlike pretty much anything he has done before, and in my opinion it is up there with his best ever work.
    What is remarkable is that a 79 year old Dylan can demonstrate that his undoubted musical genius has not diminished in any way.
    Bobby, still and forever my musical hero.
  • By far his best album since 2001's Love and Theft. I'm finding it gets better with every play.
  • It's excellent
  • Superb. 

  • Amazing how these old rockers keep going.  Will have a listen the weekend.
  • Majestic.
  • Ive just listened to the album. It’s very good but as I’m listening I kept thinking of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Murder songs”. Funnily I also downloaded Nick Cave’s album Ghosteen.
  • The first single that I bought was 'Positively 4th Street'.  From that point on, Dylan became my music hero.

    I watched 'Renaldo and Clara' overnight (all four hours + of it) in the Tyneside Cinema in the 1970s.

    I can't sing, but when I try to belt out a bit of rock, I adopt Dylan's whinge and whine.  It's the reason that I don't sing at weddings and funerals … for the risk of turning them into something out of the Rolling Thunder Revue.  At my own funeral, I expect 'Like a Rolling Stone' to accompany me out of this world.


    Although he may not have wanted to be, Dylan was the voice of our generation.  He changed musical expectations and was a natural poet.  

    Much of his rhyming has left a bit to be desired over the years ('sandwich' and 'language' … 'talks' and 'docks').  We can forgive him for that.

    But he has lost it now … and has done for several years.  Our generation doesn't need a voice now, and his lyricism has become third rate.  Much of his metre doesn't match the melody on this latest album (especially 'I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You'.  He slips into Vic Reeves 'pub style' singing on 'My Own Version of You'.

    When you consider the imagery that he has produced over the years ("You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat, who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat" … "The ghost of electricity howls from the bones in her face") and compare that with some of the lines on 'Rough and Rowdy Ways' ("Got the right spirit.  You can feel it, you can hear it.  You've got what they call the 'immortal spirit'"), you can see that Dylan lives in a less colourful world now.

    Of course, none of this matters.  Musical taste is all about what you like and what you don't like.  It doesn't matter if it's good, technically brilliant, dire or banal.  If you like it, that's all that counts.

    I like 'Key West' and 'Murder Most Foul' … although Van Morrison does such stuff better.  I was half-expecting references to Hyndford Street or the days before rock 'n' roll.

    There was a time, Bob, when you struck a match in me.  But we are both much older now … more's the pity.

    I'll leave those of you who think that this latest album is a 'masterpiece' to continue to enjoy it.  Sadly, it won't include me.


    Worse still, it has turned me into Grapevine.


  • cafc-west said:
    I've got it - but haven't listened to the whole of Murder Most Foul yet...  The first CD though is amazing and his voice, as raspy as it is (well he is 79...) somehow works with the material.
    Let's be honest. No one has ever listened to Dylan for his singing. 
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  • Solidgone said:
    Ive just listened to the album. It’s very good but as I’m listening I kept thinking of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Murder songs”. Funnily I also downloaded Nick Cave’s album Ghosteen.
    Tip: Don’t play Dylan’s album and Ghosteen back to back. 
  • Three plays now and am not keen - Murder Most Foul apart.
    If i want laid back i'll put on JJ Cale ...
  • edited July 2020
    I’m wIth @Dave Rudd on this. I was brought up on Dylan by my dad from 1974 when I was 9 years old. My dad, a dyed in the wool jazz fan, heard Tangled up in blue on the radio and loved it, and then bought Blood on the tracks when it came out, along with Greatest Hits 1. He had a copy of Greatest Hits 2 taped from my aunt. He just listened to these over and over and picked up Desire and Street Legal on release, along with filling in the blanks and getting Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and New Morning.

    He went to see Dylan at Earls Court in 1978 and then took me to one of the 1981 Earls Court shows. He got Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love. We enjoyed the “new dawn” of Infidels, the “new dawn” of Empire Burlesque and the nadir of Knocked out loaded and Down In the Groove. 

    My dad took me to see the Last Waltz at the NFT, and I also saw Don’t Look Back at the ICA (a double bill with John Cooper Clarke’s Ten Years in an open neck shirt). We taped Renaldo and Clara off Channel 4 when it had its one and only screening on British TV and spent many an hour puzzling over its mysterious vignettes and riveted by the incendiary live footage of the Rolling Thunder band and Dylan in white face make up.

    I lost my way with Dylan in the late 80s (probably due to KOL and DITG) but came back with a vengeance when the first Bootleg Series set came out. 

    I loved Street Legal with its haunting melodies and poetic lyrics, Planet Waves with its organic sound and Dylan’s fond remembrances of “old Duluth”, I loved most of Oh Mercy and all of Under the Red Sky. I loved the two acoustic album Good as I been to you and World Gone Wrong. 

    I saw him again in 1993 at Hammersmith Odeon where a high spot was a wild and mysterious I and I. I saw him again in 1995 at Brixton Acedemy, supported by a solo Elvis Costello, where he dished up such gems as Down in the Flood and Jokerman. 

    Then came the good but not great Time out of Mind, which contained the excellent Love Sick, Trying to get to heaven, Cold Irons Bound and Not Dark Yet. The rest was patchy. 

    Around 1999 my dad got me a copy of Dylan’s Hard Rain TV special from 1976 on bootleg video. This was the holy grail as it had only been shown on British TV once and my dad had recorded the sound on his old reel to reel. This was Dylan’s finest hour live in front of tv cameras, remarkable and excoriating versions of Shelter from the Storm, Mozambique, Hard Rain and Idiot Wind. The soundtrack album which didn’t include the Baez duets (including a storming I Pity the Poor Immigrant), Mozambique or Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall didn’t really do it justice. A reissue of the film has been promised as part of the Bootleg Series but we’re still waiting. Now I had the chance to see it for myself, a truly remarkable record of Dylan at the peak of his powers.

    Then came the point it started to turn, when Dylan began writing songs which in effect pastiched 1950s styles like rockabilly and American songbook stuff and began peppering his albums with lines lifted from who knows where (except it could be worked out where from thanks to the Internet). 

    Love and Theft had some good songs, the stand out was a TOOM cast off Mississippi, and High Water, Moonlight and Sugar Baby were excellent, the rest was so so. 

    I saw him again at the NEC in 2002, and it was the start of the dreaded “up singing” where he would sing a line of every song almost on one note and then go up at the end of the line. It was like he couldn’t remember the melodies or how to sing them. The last truly great song was Cross the Green Mountain from 2003.

    This is where Dylan really starts to trash his reputation. Modern Times is pretty poor and some of the songs on there lift arrangements and melodies wholesale from earlier songs. Compare Someday, Baby with Muddy Waters’ Trouble No More if you’re not sure. Lyrics were littered with quotes from a little known civil war poet called Henry Timrod.

    Together Through Life, with lyrics co-written by the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter was largely forgettable and then came 2012’s Tempest. Again, three or four tracks are interesting (Duquesne Whistle, Long and Wasted Years and Early Roman Kings) but the 14 minute title track is an embarrassing retelling of the sinking of the Titanic. Dylan’s vocals on this whole album are really rough too.

    I quite liked some of the Shadows in the Night Sinatra covers album where Dylan suddenly sounded good again, with proper singing and really thoughtful arrangements. Not sure it warranted another 4 cds of it though.

    Now we get to Rough and Rowdy Ways. Most of the reviews acclaim it as genius but I am afraid it is really terrible. Once again, it’s a pastiche album, Dylan’s band doing passable versions of 1950s style backing tracks. There is almost no singing or melodies on this album - it is pretty much spoken word. Listen to the start of Murder Most Foul and I contain Multitudes- it’s in the same key and Dylan comes in on the same one note. It’s pretty embarrassing. And all those reviews that wax lyrical about the literary references because he mentions Anne Frank and Kerouac. But that’s all he does - he just mentions them. He says “like Anne Frank” and “like Kerouac.” And that’s it.

    The songs contain very obvious rhyming structures, lines and words lifted from elsewhere and then bolted onto standard blues chord sequences lifted from the 1950s. The backing track for False Prophet sounded quite interesting until it was revealed to be lifted wholesale from Billy Emerson’s 1954 song If Loving is Believing.

    It pains me to say it given how much Bob Dylan has meant to me in my life, but over the last few years I have become convinced he is a conman and a charlatan. His autobiography lifted passages from Jack London, his Nobel prize speech lifted lines from a study guide to Moby Dick and even his paintings were copies of other people’s photos.  And there is nothing in Rough and Rowdy Ways which makes me think any differently.
  • Fascinating contributions @Dave Rudd and @EveshamAddick.
    If nothing else it's made me want to hear the new album for myself
  • This arrived about a week ago and so far gets the thumbs up, thought the vocals are nice and clear for recent Dylan.
  • Interesting thread.

    Blood on the Tracks is my favourite album of all time but I find nearly all post Desire stuff a very hard listen if I bother at all.

    He should have stuck with the Band.
  • Interesting thread.

    Blood on the Tracks is my favourite album of all time but I find nearly all post Desire stuff a very hard listen if I bother at all.

    He should have stuck with the Band.
    On that note, I was interested to read why Robbie Robertson declined to play on Dylan's latest album:

    https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/robbie-robertson-explains-why-he-turned-down-bob-dylans-new-album-1022791/

    Too busy, eh?  Hmmm.
  • Just listening to it for the first time.

    Wow. Absolutely fantastic.
  • I really enjoyed the early 2000 albums, Modern Times and Tempest , 'Rough and Rowdy Ways' for me is a return to this kind of form, I'm glad the Sinatra phase has disappeared !
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