Bob Dylan - Tempest, Sept. 11, 2012

I know of no dylan fans who claim his voice now is ideal

i know how to spell nick menage than you very much

i love his voice now!

nicki melange

If only there were some suitably reverential Bob Dylan reviews I could read to calm my outrage about this.

well this is quite a tempest!!

The one in Uncut should meet your needs. It's a stunning return to form and his strongest work in years, apparently.

John Mulvey of Uncut offers this interesting critique on his, um, blog.

Listening to “Tempest”, I can’t help wishing that one element Dylan would stop borrowing is the tradition of misogyny and objectification that is a recurring detail in a good few of these songs. Perhaps some of the more critical reviewers of the album could have examined this, rather than predicating their pieces on the apparent wrongheadedness of other reviewers, whose enthusiasm evidently doesn’t have the required ironic distance from the record.

Translation - "I hate Alexis Petridis"

we will never agree on anything again like we agree on the awfulness of petridis

I know of no dylan fans who claim his voice now is ideal

I love it. And it keeps getting better.

lit majors like Bob dylan & niki meange are the worst

Actually I think Lex's take on the lyrics in particular is pretty interesting, because it highlights how problematic it has always been to talk about Dylan as some kind of literary figure. He absolutely is one of the greatest lyricists of all time (even though he's also written plenty of lame, lazy stuff), but trying to say exactly how or why is not a straightforward thing. It isn't about storytelling, exactly -- tho he's written good story songs -- or "characters" either, which are usually enigmatic and symbolic (and often just one-liners).

If you think something like "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" is a great piece of writing, and I do, then you should be able to say why. But it's not easy, and I can imagine Lex or any other non-initiate reading the lyrics and saying, "So what? A few half-assed jokes, some borrowed mythology, big deal."

On the singing, of course, I'm in that camp that thinks he's one of the greatest singers of any kind in the last half-century. His voice is shot, obviously, but his phrasing is still sharp and I think in some ways he's gotten better with age. So I can't relate to any complaints on those fronts.

I think shakedown is otm wrt voice status but isn't it almost magical how he still makes it work?

I think he's similar to Sinatra in the way he seems able to sing anything with ease.

" ... avuncular, the wry cackle of a codger who still has an eye for the ladies. [...] a raspy, phlegmy bark that’s not exactly melodic and by no means welcoming." —John Pareles, New York Times

" ... his zombie bullfrog holler" —Sean Daly, Tampa Bay Times

" … a battered instrument that sounds like a hoarse Fred Sanford after an all-night fight with Lamont." —Howard Cohen, Miami Herald"

" ... a gargle of a vocal ... " —Jim Fusili, Wall Street Journal

" … sounds as if he's been gargling with gravel for the last several decades." —Dan DeLuca, Philly.com

" ... sounds like he's been eating nuts and bolts for the past half-century ... " —Randall Roberts, L.A. Times' Pop & Hiss

" … fury and his ruined larynx combine to remarkable effect. The opening line comes out as a terrifying, incomprehensible growl that sounds like one of those death-metal vocalists in full flight." —Alex Pettridis, The Guardian

" ... like David Johansen after three packs of Pall Malls." —Justin, ChunkyGlasses.com

" ... At times it sounds (and seems) like this is Bob Dylan-pretending-to-be-Tom Waits-pretending-to-be Bob Dylan." —Simon Sweetman, Blog on the Tracks

"He sounds tubercular." —Jim Farber, New York Daily News

dylan is no sinatra

Alex Pettridis should stick to reviewing Nicky Melange iyam

Lol no but maybe Sinatra comes to mind when you listen to how Dylan delivers the lyrics freely in what sounds almost improvisational but still never misses a beat or something.

Can't tell if those blurbs are positive or negative but most of them are pretty good.

dunno i dont listen to dylan

I am actually listening to this now and only a couple of songs in but he actually sounds quite a bit like Louis Armstrong. It's a pretty good look for him.

the riverboat gambler look he rocks now is so #swag

I like the first few tracks on this but the songs get pretty repetitive and dull after Long And Wasted Years. I've not really paid any attention to recent Dylan albums so I've no idea how this stacks up against them, but you'd certainly struggle to make a case for him being a great artist based on this record alone.

That's a given but you could make a case that the record is really good. For me it's less repetitive with every listen (lol parad0x).

DiS has a nice one abt the voice "It’s like your grandfather telling stories about days gone by. No, he most certainly doesn’t sound pretty. But you find yourself snagged on every gnarled and crooked word." Hehe.

I love his voice too.

guys did you know lex does not like Dylan

you may also be shocked to learn that he has uninformed opinions of roughly 75%(*) of music made in the 20th century

(* statistic derived from extensive, scientific database analyses of lex's ILM posts)

dylan's voice is unendingly hilarious, hardly any singer is more fun to sing along to or has been so fun to sing along to in as many different senses over his career

the big peaks on this album are "pay in blood" and "early roman kings" and in both cases it's mostly for the vocals: "early roman kings" for things like his vincent price voice on "tomorrow is friday / WE'LL SEE WHAT IT BRINGS" (i assume this is a crucifixion joke) and "pay in blood" for just being totally absurd, like that one live version of "high water" on tell tale signs where he's like HIWUHAHTEREVVVVVVVVVRYHUHWHURRRRRRRRRRRRR. ("pay in blood" is probably better, it is much lusher and prettier musically than almost everything else on the album, but i am a sucker for all the evil cartoon plutocrat stuff in "early roman kings", and for how well it works Primary Dylan Gimmick of collapsing image systems, maybe a polite phrase for cliches, into each other, so that american-progressive-era robber-baron caricatures and modern conspicuous consumption and the tarquins and the caesars and rock stars and finally bob dylan are smeared across each other into a single big hallucination). lots of other stuff on the first half is gorgeous too but in the end i don't think much of the big ambitious ones at the end -- some stuff i like a lot in the title track but the melody drives me insane. prefer "tin angel" because the gore's better. the less said about the lennon thing the better.

i do love his pronunciation of "quarterdeck".

I thought Lex's Dylan review was pretty good. I don't know if I agree with it, since I haven't heard "Tempest" yet, but I could understand someone having a similar reaction to, say, "Together Through Life". I thought he sounded a bit uninspired on that one. I loved "Modern Times" and most of "Love and Theft", but even there, I think you have to be quite sensitized to the subtle nuances in what's left of Dylan's voice to appreciate his delivery these days.

the vocals MAKE this album. Y'all know that.

the music is really bizarre. totally repetitive, but with the most minor unique flourishes here an there. they're SO minor, ya wonder why they bothered... but they did... and then they go back to playing the exact same thing in the exact same way for another 32 bars.

Buncha weirdos!

I enjoyed the Dylan vocal onomatopoeia in "difficult listening hour"s post above.

Speed the backing tracks up to 78 rpm and sometimes it could be Extreme Noise Terror.

so this thing got published, huh.

i've scarcely read anything on a putatively "respectable" website so flip, so uncomprehending, so sure of its own contrarian brilliance and yet so devoid of insight, so filled with hasty and erroneous generalization, misdescription, false analogy -- and that's just in the first few paragraphs. i couldn't read any more.

i'm sure you're a nice guy and all, alex, and no doubt you have family and friends that love you, and talents galore. but good fucking lord are you a horrible writer. thanks for wasting a few minutes of my life.

re. dylan's voice, it does sound like each individual drop of phlegm has been close-mic'ed.

this album is wearing a little thin after a bunch of plays. i'm just not hearing new stuff in the arrangements or even in his phrasing. and there are only really four or five tracks that really satisfy. i doubt i'll be listening to this very much in the future. but it still one of his better late albums, i suppose.

everyone talks as though writing sensitively about lyrics is so hard. it takes time and effort, and it helps to have training in scansion and prosody, but it's not really all that difficult. just most rock critics can't or won't expend the effort, governed as they are by quick judgements/challenging opinions® and looming deadlines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbkjw1mWsRE

Lex is a very good writer when he writes about what he knows or is interested in. I go by his recommendations for a lot of things, but not in relation to Bob Dylan.

Ha, amateurist, you are right about that article. Sentences like A sole ill-fated attempt to get into him – in my defence I was an easily misled 18-year-old, still briefly beholden to the Greatest Albums Ever lists churned out by the music press – ended two-and-a-half songs into a best-of compilation with me flinging the CD out of the window, outraged that anyone could have the temerity to sing like that and call it art, in which - almost marvellously - every significant word is an ugly cliche make me want to "fling something out of a window".

I think the central fault here is whoever commissioned him to do a purposely challops piece to wind up Grauniad readers.

i'd say the fault is shared between editor and author. but i take your point.

Anyone read the RS cover story? Does this interpretation jive with reality?

i think you mean jibe

Yes.

At the news stand yesterday the guy said he was sold out!

got tickets for his verizon center show in dc, never seen him before, figured i would regret it if he croaks soonish

i just got tix for the colorado show. what the heck! he better be playing some of the new stuff. weirdly, this last tour saw him breaking back into together through life after ignoring it aside from "forgetful heart" for the last two years or so.

the real controversy about this is "ellen allien, the legendary techno producer"...

is there anyone in the comments who's like "SHE DOESN'T EVEN PLAY HER OWN INSTRUMENTS COME ON"

i was pleasantly surprised to read in these comments the nicest guardian BTL post about me i've ever seen!

I bet Bob Dylan could make a better record with Tobias Freund xpost.