Tempest
His devotees noted Shakespeare\'s final play was named The Tempest, but 71-year-old Bob Dylan shot down speculation that it means this will be his final album. For the past decade, Dylan has sounded remarkably comfortable in the recording studio, releasing a string of albums that capture vintage blues, R&B and country string band music to complement his road-worn voice. \"I ain\'t dead yet, my bell still rings,\" he sings on the \"Mannish Boy\"-influenced \"Early Roman Kings\" and it sounds like a reassurance. Dylan susses meaning from phrases others throw away. This is dark, dusty music with secrets tucked inside its riddles. \"Duquesne Whistle,\" a collaboration with Robert Hunter, shuffles down the line. A hypnotizing riff works over \"Narrow Way\" for seven-plus minutes as Dylan quotes the Mississippi Sheiks. On \"Pay In Blood,\" Dylan sounds like a man settling a score. \"Scarlet Town\" and \"Tin Angel\" extend the narratives, but it\'s the title track that squeezes 45 verses into 14 minutes for an epic that wanders from shipwreck to Leonardo DiCaprio without losing the thread.
For all its detours toward sadness and alienation, death is the real story on Bob Dylan's latest album, very much a record about The End. He's learned, at 71, that death doesn't necessarily come with a lesson, that sometimes it just comes.
What do you do after facing down mortality and making a grand final statement that turns out to be not so final after all? If you’re Bob Dylan in the years since his 1997 masterpiece Time Out Of Mind, you keep rolling on. On the four albums he’s released since then—factoring out the bizarre yuletide excursion Christmas…
Bob Dylan returns. The results are immeasurably more compelling than we have any right to expect from a 71-year old songwriting legend on his 35th album.
Can anyone remember the last time there was so much hype and publicity surrounding a new Bob Dylan album?
A growling Dylan is steeped in country blues and old murder ballads on his strongest album for 11 years, writes <strong>Caspar Llewellyn Smith</strong>
<strong>Alexis Petridis</strong>: Dylan's latest is angry, growling and mostly great fun. But comparing it to his best work is way over the top
Zimmy returns as an incantatory shaman singing songs from the underworld. CD review by Mark Kidel