What I have heard seems fine/does seem very similar (humoureasy listening old bloke's ramblings) to 9/11 LAT. I await my under-£9 including DVD from amaz.uk c.26-29-08 with anticipation ...
So far on recent/current tour Bob has avoided remembering lyrics etc of new stuff ...
My favourite bloke writers are Costello, Dylan, Simon, Cohen, PF Waters etc (only recent greats - Kaiser Chiefs although some people rate Razorlight).
Modern Times - Bob Dylan
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martinfoyle
- Posts: 2502
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 5:24 pm
- Location: Dublin, Ireland
- Contact:
Congratulations to Sony for keeping this under wraps so long, it only leaked yesterday. I downloaded a hissy 192kps mp3 version this morning and have given it a couple of listens. I like it and expect to love it. A bit long, of course, at 62 minutes, still I may get to be more accepting. When The Deal Goes Down is the classic pop tune in the making, it would be a huge hit for a more mainstream singer. The sequence alternates between slow and fast, up and down. The overall sound is much what I expected of the band I saw last November. This is a strength since it's very much a strong band sound, no distracting virtuosos. A good one, I cant wait to get a proper copy on friday.
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Extreme Honey
- Posts: 622
- Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2005 3:44 pm
- Location: toronto, canada
For the first time deliberately I have decided not to download a ripped copy just because I've waited fro so long and I want to keep it a surprise!
Preacher was a talkin' there's a sermon he gave,
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved,
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it's you who must keep it satisfied
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved,
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it's you who must keep it satisfied
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Who Shot Sam?
- Posts: 7097
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 5:05 pm
- Location: Somewhere in the distance
- Contact:
Very positive review of the new album in today's LA Times, by Ann Powers:
POP ALBUM REVIEW
Seduced by the master once again
Saucy, romantic ... Bob Dylan? He's all that on "Modern Times," with a touch of the blues too.
By Ann Powers
Times Staff Writer
August 25, 2006
"Funny" and "sexy" are two words that don't often surface in the heap of praise directed at Bob Dylan. He's always been as skilled a wisecracker as a waxing poet, and who could doubt his penchant for romance? After all, he wrote "Lay Lady Lay." To his own chagrin, Dylan's spicy side has long been overshadowed by his talent for writing generational anthems.
Now, in the autumn of his years, he's rightfully admired for creating a body of work that's biblical in spirit and, virtually, size. But it's good to remember that his joke book packs as much punch as his archive of wisdom. And don't forget his little black book, either.
"Put some sugar in my bowl, I feel like laying down," Dylan, 65, sings on the make-out ballad "Spirit on the Water," borrowing the line from Nina Simone, who also knew that love, laughter and rage coexist on the same color wheel. The song is based around a descending guitar line as polished as a gigolo's smile. Its Hoagy Carmichael swing is only one sound explored on the new album "Modern Times," which also encompasses Chicago blues and — nothing else to call it — Dylanesque rock. But the song's seductiveness turns up everywhere. Recorded with Dylan's current touring band, which shows simpatico grace of an ensemble out to prove nothing beyond the pleasure of each other's company, this swinging, sometimes mournful, often tender set of 10 songs proves an easy album to, well, love.
"Modern Times" fulfills the mandate of a late Dylan album: its 10 songs make you think hard about the past and muse quietly about the future. Titles like "Thunder on the Mountain" feature apocalypse aplenty, and rejuvenating interpolations of source material from Muddy Waters, Carl Perkins and the like further Dylan's efforts to expose the "strong foundation," as he calls it, of his own work. But Dylan also gives a randy tickle to the funny bone and the family jewels, reminding us all that, in pop at least, profundities register better when stirred with something sweet.
The sauciness of "Modern Times" is a necessary complement to its more philosophical side. Though his personal eccentricities earn chuckles, Dylan's work is never taken lightly, partly because of his own legacy building. The process of Bob Beatification that's been going on since 1997 — the year he released his late-phase masterwork "Time Out of Mind" and survived a serious wake-up call in the form of a heart infection — has secured his status as Bard of Rock, whose music encapsulates everything serious and noble about American music. He's our living Rosetta stone, his songs carrying forth the essence of a thousand blues and folk classics, connecting the canonical and the folkloric to the present day.
Dylan has aided this process through several dramatic acts of self-documentation, most recently his memoir "Chronicles" and the Martin Scorsese-directed documentary "No Direction Home." He's been analyzed by Oxford don Christopher Ricks, named an album ("Love and Theft") after a study of blackface minstrels by University of Virginia prof Eric Lott, and continues to be regularly nominated for the Nobel Prize. Dylan's music supports these elevating moves: He's made three great records since hitting the age of AARP membership, each more explicitly grounded in arcane Americana, such as the borrowed Muddy Waters titles and the lyrical references to Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. The case for Dylan as enduring Serious Artist has been secured by his own footnotes.
Yet even as Dylan transformed himself into Shakespeare, something else was happening. He was getting … looser. Maybe it started with the Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup that also featured a Beatle, George Harrison, shaking loose of his heroic shackles. In that band's 1990 single, "She's My Baby," Dylan sang about his girl sticking her tongue right down his throat. In the video, he's wearing a straw boater hat, a foreshadowing of the straight-out-of-"Deadwood" costumes he currently wears. He doesn't look as if he's making history. He looks as if he's having fun.
Fun has been a major aspect of Dylan's resurgence, though it's not often emphasized by the man himself or his iconographers. The lyric of "Highlands," the standout epic ballad from "Time Out of Mind," turned on a lengthy comedy routine involving a waitress and a hard-boiled egg. (There was also a line about Dylan's neighbors complaining that he was playing his Neil Young records too loud.) "Love and Theft," whose CD packaging included a staged "band rehearsal" photograph worthy of some folkie "Spinal Tap," started off with a musical sketch about two outlaw clowns named Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and got more raucous from there. Now, with the more musically subdued "Modern Times," Dylan takes time to explore the nuances of romantic comedy, though his jokes usually carry a sting and his romance, like so many, ends in tears.
Charlie Chaplin, whose last silent film likely inspired the title of "Modern Times," invented a character similar to the one Dylan inhabits here. A sad sack with hidden powers, Chaplin's Little Tramp gets his girl only after many rounds of humiliation. Dylan exposes his own romantic desires and weaknesses throughout the songs of "Modern Times," pinning a rose to his torn lapel and crooning in that hard-won, threadbare voice:
I'm touched with desire
What don't I do?
Through flame and through fire
I'll build my world around you
The end times may be near, but that's no reason to stop spooning.
The image of an old man in full Casanova mode is one that makes many people uncomfortable. Dylan foregrounds the ludicrousness of his courting stance in "Thunder on the Mountain," the Chuck Berry-style romp that begins the album, by expressing a certain fascination with R&B singer Alicia Keys. Keys is not much older than Dylan's youngest daughter, and that's reason enough to snicker — no wonder Dylan weeps whenever he thinks of her, growling his admiration in a tone that only shows off his vocal decrepitude. But she's a ringer here.
The woman Dylan pursues throughout the fire and flood of "Modern Times" is someone who's been around much longer. She is the universal temptress who dances through Dylan's dreamscape: Call her Bathsheba, Salome or simply "sugar mama," as Dylan does. Innocent or a "lazy slut" (as Dylan indecorously calls her in "Rollin' and Tumblin," one of the album's Muddy Waters rewrites), momentarily captured or forever elusive, she represents the futility of pursuing anything but provisional happiness within a dying world. The one time Dylan does name her on "Modern Times" reinforces her unattainability: It's in the elegantly folkish "Nettie Moore," whose title he took from a mid-19th century song about a love affair destroyed when the woman, a slave, is sold.
Dylan's view of women is as traditional as his love of analog recording and old-timey songs. This self-proclaimed family man, who felt so little need to distinguish the identities of his ex-wives in his autobiography that he merged them, does seem a bit miffed that young women in particular exert so much pull over him. Yet even if the furious longing he expresses throughout "Modern Times" has one root in a pre-feminist's discontent with modern gender roles, it's also heavier than that. The silly, wretched pounding of Dylan's heart, like the ragged flower Chaplin's Tramp offers his tattered sweetheart, presents romance as the strategy against life's devastating assaults. This heroism, Dylan ruefully intimates, is bound to fail.
Such thoughts are as serious as the Louisiana flood Dylan spookily anticipated with 2001's "High Water," a disaster he addresses with bitter black humor here in "The Levee's Gonna Break." Like Chaplin getting stuck in the cog of a giant factory wheel in "Modern Times," Dylan plays up the touching absurdity of dire situations. This links him, as always, to the blues. Quoting the sources you'd expect — Memphis Minnie for that levee song, Big Joe Williams via Merle Haggard on "Workingman's Blues 2," three traditional songs in "Nettie Moore" — he strikes the shifting balance of bawdiness and sexual dread that typified the early blues, a music made by poor people, usually black and often female, for whom asserting desire was an act of near-revolution. In the songs Dylan admires and in many ways emulates, images easily move from the earthy to the surreal to the comic, remaining as unsettled as the feelings they express.
That's what happens in songs like "Thunder on the Mountain," in which the sexual metaphor "I got the pork chops, she got the pie" finds its way into scenes worthy of Revelations, or in the Patti Smith-style jeremiad "Ain't Talkin," which inserts a homely image borrowed from a bluegrass tune — "Eatin' hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town" — into a landscape otherwise rife with visions of eternal light. It seems that what Dylan wants us to remember about the traditional music he champions isn't that it was deeper or more serious than the well-engineered sounds that fill our ears now. It's that the old songs don't make distinctions between serious and funny, love and religion, the food of the body and the food of the soul. Like an old man and his "Modern" music, the old songs are beyond all that.
POP ALBUM REVIEW
Seduced by the master once again
Saucy, romantic ... Bob Dylan? He's all that on "Modern Times," with a touch of the blues too.
By Ann Powers
Times Staff Writer
August 25, 2006
"Funny" and "sexy" are two words that don't often surface in the heap of praise directed at Bob Dylan. He's always been as skilled a wisecracker as a waxing poet, and who could doubt his penchant for romance? After all, he wrote "Lay Lady Lay." To his own chagrin, Dylan's spicy side has long been overshadowed by his talent for writing generational anthems.
Now, in the autumn of his years, he's rightfully admired for creating a body of work that's biblical in spirit and, virtually, size. But it's good to remember that his joke book packs as much punch as his archive of wisdom. And don't forget his little black book, either.
"Put some sugar in my bowl, I feel like laying down," Dylan, 65, sings on the make-out ballad "Spirit on the Water," borrowing the line from Nina Simone, who also knew that love, laughter and rage coexist on the same color wheel. The song is based around a descending guitar line as polished as a gigolo's smile. Its Hoagy Carmichael swing is only one sound explored on the new album "Modern Times," which also encompasses Chicago blues and — nothing else to call it — Dylanesque rock. But the song's seductiveness turns up everywhere. Recorded with Dylan's current touring band, which shows simpatico grace of an ensemble out to prove nothing beyond the pleasure of each other's company, this swinging, sometimes mournful, often tender set of 10 songs proves an easy album to, well, love.
"Modern Times" fulfills the mandate of a late Dylan album: its 10 songs make you think hard about the past and muse quietly about the future. Titles like "Thunder on the Mountain" feature apocalypse aplenty, and rejuvenating interpolations of source material from Muddy Waters, Carl Perkins and the like further Dylan's efforts to expose the "strong foundation," as he calls it, of his own work. But Dylan also gives a randy tickle to the funny bone and the family jewels, reminding us all that, in pop at least, profundities register better when stirred with something sweet.
The sauciness of "Modern Times" is a necessary complement to its more philosophical side. Though his personal eccentricities earn chuckles, Dylan's work is never taken lightly, partly because of his own legacy building. The process of Bob Beatification that's been going on since 1997 — the year he released his late-phase masterwork "Time Out of Mind" and survived a serious wake-up call in the form of a heart infection — has secured his status as Bard of Rock, whose music encapsulates everything serious and noble about American music. He's our living Rosetta stone, his songs carrying forth the essence of a thousand blues and folk classics, connecting the canonical and the folkloric to the present day.
Dylan has aided this process through several dramatic acts of self-documentation, most recently his memoir "Chronicles" and the Martin Scorsese-directed documentary "No Direction Home." He's been analyzed by Oxford don Christopher Ricks, named an album ("Love and Theft") after a study of blackface minstrels by University of Virginia prof Eric Lott, and continues to be regularly nominated for the Nobel Prize. Dylan's music supports these elevating moves: He's made three great records since hitting the age of AARP membership, each more explicitly grounded in arcane Americana, such as the borrowed Muddy Waters titles and the lyrical references to Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. The case for Dylan as enduring Serious Artist has been secured by his own footnotes.
Yet even as Dylan transformed himself into Shakespeare, something else was happening. He was getting … looser. Maybe it started with the Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup that also featured a Beatle, George Harrison, shaking loose of his heroic shackles. In that band's 1990 single, "She's My Baby," Dylan sang about his girl sticking her tongue right down his throat. In the video, he's wearing a straw boater hat, a foreshadowing of the straight-out-of-"Deadwood" costumes he currently wears. He doesn't look as if he's making history. He looks as if he's having fun.
Fun has been a major aspect of Dylan's resurgence, though it's not often emphasized by the man himself or his iconographers. The lyric of "Highlands," the standout epic ballad from "Time Out of Mind," turned on a lengthy comedy routine involving a waitress and a hard-boiled egg. (There was also a line about Dylan's neighbors complaining that he was playing his Neil Young records too loud.) "Love and Theft," whose CD packaging included a staged "band rehearsal" photograph worthy of some folkie "Spinal Tap," started off with a musical sketch about two outlaw clowns named Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and got more raucous from there. Now, with the more musically subdued "Modern Times," Dylan takes time to explore the nuances of romantic comedy, though his jokes usually carry a sting and his romance, like so many, ends in tears.
Charlie Chaplin, whose last silent film likely inspired the title of "Modern Times," invented a character similar to the one Dylan inhabits here. A sad sack with hidden powers, Chaplin's Little Tramp gets his girl only after many rounds of humiliation. Dylan exposes his own romantic desires and weaknesses throughout the songs of "Modern Times," pinning a rose to his torn lapel and crooning in that hard-won, threadbare voice:
I'm touched with desire
What don't I do?
Through flame and through fire
I'll build my world around you
The end times may be near, but that's no reason to stop spooning.
The image of an old man in full Casanova mode is one that makes many people uncomfortable. Dylan foregrounds the ludicrousness of his courting stance in "Thunder on the Mountain," the Chuck Berry-style romp that begins the album, by expressing a certain fascination with R&B singer Alicia Keys. Keys is not much older than Dylan's youngest daughter, and that's reason enough to snicker — no wonder Dylan weeps whenever he thinks of her, growling his admiration in a tone that only shows off his vocal decrepitude. But she's a ringer here.
The woman Dylan pursues throughout the fire and flood of "Modern Times" is someone who's been around much longer. She is the universal temptress who dances through Dylan's dreamscape: Call her Bathsheba, Salome or simply "sugar mama," as Dylan does. Innocent or a "lazy slut" (as Dylan indecorously calls her in "Rollin' and Tumblin," one of the album's Muddy Waters rewrites), momentarily captured or forever elusive, she represents the futility of pursuing anything but provisional happiness within a dying world. The one time Dylan does name her on "Modern Times" reinforces her unattainability: It's in the elegantly folkish "Nettie Moore," whose title he took from a mid-19th century song about a love affair destroyed when the woman, a slave, is sold.
Dylan's view of women is as traditional as his love of analog recording and old-timey songs. This self-proclaimed family man, who felt so little need to distinguish the identities of his ex-wives in his autobiography that he merged them, does seem a bit miffed that young women in particular exert so much pull over him. Yet even if the furious longing he expresses throughout "Modern Times" has one root in a pre-feminist's discontent with modern gender roles, it's also heavier than that. The silly, wretched pounding of Dylan's heart, like the ragged flower Chaplin's Tramp offers his tattered sweetheart, presents romance as the strategy against life's devastating assaults. This heroism, Dylan ruefully intimates, is bound to fail.
Such thoughts are as serious as the Louisiana flood Dylan spookily anticipated with 2001's "High Water," a disaster he addresses with bitter black humor here in "The Levee's Gonna Break." Like Chaplin getting stuck in the cog of a giant factory wheel in "Modern Times," Dylan plays up the touching absurdity of dire situations. This links him, as always, to the blues. Quoting the sources you'd expect — Memphis Minnie for that levee song, Big Joe Williams via Merle Haggard on "Workingman's Blues 2," three traditional songs in "Nettie Moore" — he strikes the shifting balance of bawdiness and sexual dread that typified the early blues, a music made by poor people, usually black and often female, for whom asserting desire was an act of near-revolution. In the songs Dylan admires and in many ways emulates, images easily move from the earthy to the surreal to the comic, remaining as unsettled as the feelings they express.
That's what happens in songs like "Thunder on the Mountain," in which the sexual metaphor "I got the pork chops, she got the pie" finds its way into scenes worthy of Revelations, or in the Patti Smith-style jeremiad "Ain't Talkin," which inserts a homely image borrowed from a bluegrass tune — "Eatin' hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town" — into a landscape otherwise rife with visions of eternal light. It seems that what Dylan wants us to remember about the traditional music he champions isn't that it was deeper or more serious than the well-engineered sounds that fill our ears now. It's that the old songs don't make distinctions between serious and funny, love and religion, the food of the body and the food of the soul. Like an old man and his "Modern" music, the old songs are beyond all that.
Mother, Moose-Hunter, Maverick
-
martinfoyle
- Posts: 2502
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 5:24 pm
- Location: Dublin, Ireland
- Contact:
Not surprisingly, Alexis Petredis posts an amusing review. My man in one of Dublins few remaining independant shops was stiffed by Sony and wont get his copies until next wednesday, so I'll have to wait until then to get a good copy.
Bob Dylan, Modern Times
4 stars (Label)
Alexis Petridis
Friday August 25, 2006
Guardian
With just hours to go until release, the competition to see who can slather Bob Dylan's 32nd studio album with the most deranged praise known to man is hotting up. The Americans have started strongly. US magazine Blender has ranked Modern Times alongside the work not merely of jazz giant Sonny Rollins, but of Matisse and Yeats, and has deployed the classic Dylan obsessive's strategy of lavishing superlatives on what appears to be an unremarkable lyric. "Wonderful lines galore," it enthused. "Try, 'I got the pork chops, she got the pie.'" Thus is Dylan's place among the deities of modern letters further assured.
Meanwhile, Britain's best hope for a medal may lie with Professor Christopher Ricks, who famously compared the Dylan lyric "All the tired horses in the sun/ How am I supposed to get any riding done?" to Keats, Tennyson, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Browning. Or perhaps with the Sunday Times arts writer who once informed us that in any list of the greatest albums ever Dylan's entire oeuvre would occupy the top 42 places. Evidently, pipsqueaks such as the Beatles or Marvin Gaye struggled in vain to match the musical heights attained by Down in the Groove or Dylan and the Dead.
What is it about him that makes otherwise intelligent men abandon all sense of rationality, and write stuff like the last Guardian review of Dylan live, which started with the critic announcing he was there to "touch the hem", then got progressively less objective? None of Dylan's peers, their influence on music every bit as tumultuous and far-reaching, can provoke that kind of effect: eyes are narrowed when Paul McCartney releases an album or the Stones tour, and guffaws are barely stifled when Lou Reed brings his t'ai chi master on stage. Dylan is held to be "still doing it for the music", but what are the rest of them doing it for? The money? A desperate attempt to bolster their meagre level of fame?
Certainly, Dylan has enjoyed an artistic renaissance, in that he published a fantastic autobiography and stopped releasing records that made you want to rip your own head off with embarrassment - but that alone isn't enough to explain the mania that greets his every action. Perhaps it is linked to his 1997 brush with pericarditis and intimations of mortality; praise him unequivocally now, while he can still read it.
Either way, it's hard to hear Modern Times' music over the inevitable standing ovation and the thuds of middle-aged critics swooning in awe. When you do, you find something not unlike its predecessor, Love and Theft. It again eschews the straightforward rock approach and sonic embellishments that producer Daniel Lanois brought to 1997's Time Out of Mind in favour of muted rockabilly shuffles and polite, country-inflected pre-rock'n'roll pop. Here are the kind of jazzy songs that would count as mild-mannered crooning if they were performed by Bing Crosby, but which invariably take on a slightly unsettling air when subjected to Dylan's catarrhal death rattle.
Some of these are great. You don't need to believe that Dylan's artistic renaissance is the most important event in western culture since the actual Renaissance to be beguiled by the descending riff of Spirit on the Water, or Nettie Moore's insistent pulse. Like The Friday Night Project's studio audience, Dylan dingbats tend to bust a gut over things that leave everyone else stony-faced: Love and Theft apparently caused uncontrollable mirth by featuring not only the line "Freddie or not, here I come", but also - and if you don't want to die laughing, look away now - "I'm no pig without a wig". Here, though, Thunder on the Mountains is genuinely funny. "I was thinking about Alicia Keys," he sings huskily, "I couldn't help from crying" - a sentiment with which anyone who has experienced the R&B singer's sanctimonious interviews and rotten poetry ("Hello morning/ Now I see you/ 'Cause I am awake") can heartily concur.
There are two lengthy epics. Workingman's Blues 2 has an elegiac, dying-of-the-light quality, bolstered by the singers' colloidal croak, and vaguely political lyrics: "The buying power of the proletariat's gone down." The closing Ain't Talkin' is a chilling low growl, full of muttered imprecations and intimations of doom. Equally, there are longueurs, songs that outstay their welcome or sound like filler, moments where you find your attention drifting elsewhere - frequently to the question of where all that crap about Matisse and Yeats fits with this largely pleasant and unassuming record.
Modern Times is not one of those infrequent, unequivocally fantastic Dylan albums that allow a non-believer to grasp what the fuss is about, or at least what the fuss was originally rooted in. But that scarcely seems to matter: said fuss seems set to continue until Modern Times and, indeed, modern times are merely a distant memory.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Bob Dylan, Modern Times
4 stars (Label)
Alexis Petridis
Friday August 25, 2006
Guardian
With just hours to go until release, the competition to see who can slather Bob Dylan's 32nd studio album with the most deranged praise known to man is hotting up. The Americans have started strongly. US magazine Blender has ranked Modern Times alongside the work not merely of jazz giant Sonny Rollins, but of Matisse and Yeats, and has deployed the classic Dylan obsessive's strategy of lavishing superlatives on what appears to be an unremarkable lyric. "Wonderful lines galore," it enthused. "Try, 'I got the pork chops, she got the pie.'" Thus is Dylan's place among the deities of modern letters further assured.
Meanwhile, Britain's best hope for a medal may lie with Professor Christopher Ricks, who famously compared the Dylan lyric "All the tired horses in the sun/ How am I supposed to get any riding done?" to Keats, Tennyson, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Browning. Or perhaps with the Sunday Times arts writer who once informed us that in any list of the greatest albums ever Dylan's entire oeuvre would occupy the top 42 places. Evidently, pipsqueaks such as the Beatles or Marvin Gaye struggled in vain to match the musical heights attained by Down in the Groove or Dylan and the Dead.
What is it about him that makes otherwise intelligent men abandon all sense of rationality, and write stuff like the last Guardian review of Dylan live, which started with the critic announcing he was there to "touch the hem", then got progressively less objective? None of Dylan's peers, their influence on music every bit as tumultuous and far-reaching, can provoke that kind of effect: eyes are narrowed when Paul McCartney releases an album or the Stones tour, and guffaws are barely stifled when Lou Reed brings his t'ai chi master on stage. Dylan is held to be "still doing it for the music", but what are the rest of them doing it for? The money? A desperate attempt to bolster their meagre level of fame?
Certainly, Dylan has enjoyed an artistic renaissance, in that he published a fantastic autobiography and stopped releasing records that made you want to rip your own head off with embarrassment - but that alone isn't enough to explain the mania that greets his every action. Perhaps it is linked to his 1997 brush with pericarditis and intimations of mortality; praise him unequivocally now, while he can still read it.
Either way, it's hard to hear Modern Times' music over the inevitable standing ovation and the thuds of middle-aged critics swooning in awe. When you do, you find something not unlike its predecessor, Love and Theft. It again eschews the straightforward rock approach and sonic embellishments that producer Daniel Lanois brought to 1997's Time Out of Mind in favour of muted rockabilly shuffles and polite, country-inflected pre-rock'n'roll pop. Here are the kind of jazzy songs that would count as mild-mannered crooning if they were performed by Bing Crosby, but which invariably take on a slightly unsettling air when subjected to Dylan's catarrhal death rattle.
Some of these are great. You don't need to believe that Dylan's artistic renaissance is the most important event in western culture since the actual Renaissance to be beguiled by the descending riff of Spirit on the Water, or Nettie Moore's insistent pulse. Like The Friday Night Project's studio audience, Dylan dingbats tend to bust a gut over things that leave everyone else stony-faced: Love and Theft apparently caused uncontrollable mirth by featuring not only the line "Freddie or not, here I come", but also - and if you don't want to die laughing, look away now - "I'm no pig without a wig". Here, though, Thunder on the Mountains is genuinely funny. "I was thinking about Alicia Keys," he sings huskily, "I couldn't help from crying" - a sentiment with which anyone who has experienced the R&B singer's sanctimonious interviews and rotten poetry ("Hello morning/ Now I see you/ 'Cause I am awake") can heartily concur.
There are two lengthy epics. Workingman's Blues 2 has an elegiac, dying-of-the-light quality, bolstered by the singers' colloidal croak, and vaguely political lyrics: "The buying power of the proletariat's gone down." The closing Ain't Talkin' is a chilling low growl, full of muttered imprecations and intimations of doom. Equally, there are longueurs, songs that outstay their welcome or sound like filler, moments where you find your attention drifting elsewhere - frequently to the question of where all that crap about Matisse and Yeats fits with this largely pleasant and unassuming record.
Modern Times is not one of those infrequent, unequivocally fantastic Dylan albums that allow a non-believer to grasp what the fuss is about, or at least what the fuss was originally rooted in. But that scarcely seems to matter: said fuss seems set to continue until Modern Times and, indeed, modern times are merely a distant memory.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Last edited by martinfoyle on Fri Aug 25, 2006 12:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Who Shot Sam?
- Posts: 7097
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 5:05 pm
- Location: Somewhere in the distance
- Contact:
Today's the day, UK contingency. Anybody pick it up yet?
While those of us in North American anxiously await tomorrow's release date, XM satellite radio is previewing the album in its entirety at noon and 7 PM EST today. (They already played it at midnight last night and 6 AM this morning, but I haven't decided if I want to listen to it before I get back excitedly from the store tomorrow).
I actually dreamed about this album last night - that's how excited I am.
While those of us in North American anxiously await tomorrow's release date, XM satellite radio is previewing the album in its entirety at noon and 7 PM EST today. (They already played it at midnight last night and 6 AM this morning, but I haven't decided if I want to listen to it before I get back excitedly from the store tomorrow).
I actually dreamed about this album last night - that's how excited I am.
This morning you've got time for a hot, home-cooked breakfast! Delicious and piping hot in only 3 microwave minutes.
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invisible Pole
- Posts: 2228
- Joined: Tue Jun 29, 2004 2:20 pm
- Location: Poland
Already 97 points (out of 100) on Metacritic score !
http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists ... oderntimes
Either it's a masterpiece or music journalists have gone a little overboard.
Can't wait to hear it !
http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists ... oderntimes
Either it's a masterpiece or music journalists have gone a little overboard.
Can't wait to hear it !
If you don't know what is wrong with me
Then you don't know what you've missed
Then you don't know what you've missed
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Bad Ambassador
- Posts: 244
- Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 9:39 am
- Location: http://justplayed. wordpress.com/
- Contact:
I picked up the CD/DVD set from Woolies earlier. They had once again ballsed up their pricing of special editions so I was able to get it for 9.97 instead of 14.97. They hurriedly set about repricing the special editions as I left the store.
DVD seems inconsequential enough, but the album, on first listen seemed pretty decent. Can agree with Petridis that it's in keeping with 'Love & Theft' but I enjoyed it. Will have a more serious listen soon.
DVD seems inconsequential enough, but the album, on first listen seemed pretty decent. Can agree with Petridis that it's in keeping with 'Love & Theft' but I enjoyed it. Will have a more serious listen soon.
Decided to give in and listen to the 7 PM XM radio preview. They played the whole album and needless to say I am very happy with Modern Times on first listen. It definitely seems like one that will take a few listens to fully appreciate, but it's definitely up to standard compared to Dylan's last two.
The only thing that surprised me about it was how much it directly lifted from classic blues tracks. "Rollin' and Tumblin' " is only a slight variation from the Muddy Waters song of the same name, and "Someday Baby" and a few of the other tracks also lift pretty directly from the older blues songs. But that's minor... one cool thing about Modern Times is that it's a lot more piano heavy than the last two. And the final track, "Ain't Talkin' " is brilliant.
Looking very forward to picking up a copy of this album tomorrow.
The only thing that surprised me about it was how much it directly lifted from classic blues tracks. "Rollin' and Tumblin' " is only a slight variation from the Muddy Waters song of the same name, and "Someday Baby" and a few of the other tracks also lift pretty directly from the older blues songs. But that's minor... one cool thing about Modern Times is that it's a lot more piano heavy than the last two. And the final track, "Ain't Talkin' " is brilliant.
Looking very forward to picking up a copy of this album tomorrow.
This morning you've got time for a hot, home-cooked breakfast! Delicious and piping hot in only 3 microwave minutes.
I am now the proud owner of one special edition w/ DVD copy of Modern Times. Are Bad Ambassador and I seriously the only people who have picked up a copy so far? I thought there were a lot of Dylan fans aboard.
This morning you've got time for a hot, home-cooked breakfast! Delicious and piping hot in only 3 microwave minutes.
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Who Shot Sam?
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Picked up mine this afternoon, enjoying it as I type. I'm going to like getting acquainted with this one.BlueChair wrote:I am now the proud owner of one special edition w/ DVD copy of Modern Times. Are Bad Ambassador and I seriously the only people who have picked up a copy so far? I thought there were a lot of Dylan fans aboard.
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bambooneedle
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There's something undignified about rushing to HMV or wherever to get the latest release, I'll probably pick it up one day as I pass by, put it on a dozen times, and then read the reviews and get more familiar about the other songs and things it references and other details about it.BlueChair wrote:I am now the proud owner of one special edition w/ DVD copy of Modern Times. Are Bad Ambassador and I seriously the only people who have picked up a copy so far? I thought there were a lot of Dylan fans aboard.
I think it has more to do with the sheer anticipation held by the individual when it comes to what is being released. I'm sure there are a lot of Elvis fans on here who have to get new releases on the day they come out. I have fond memories of picking up highly-anticipated albums like When I Was Cruel, The Delivery Man and "Love & Theft" on their days of release and am sure others on here have similar memories for other albums too.
Plus a naive part of me wants to see this album hit No. 1, so it was important for me to at least get it this week.
Plus a naive part of me wants to see this album hit No. 1, so it was important for me to at least get it this week.
This morning you've got time for a hot, home-cooked breakfast! Delicious and piping hot in only 3 microwave minutes.
One weird thing about the bonus DVD:
While it was cool to see Dylan's performance of "Love Sick" from the 1998 Grammy Awards again, I kept waiting for the Soy Bomb character to surface. They somehow managed to edit that out, but I have no idea how!
While it was cool to see Dylan's performance of "Love Sick" from the 1998 Grammy Awards again, I kept waiting for the Soy Bomb character to surface. They somehow managed to edit that out, but I have no idea how!
This morning you've got time for a hot, home-cooked breakfast! Delicious and piping hot in only 3 microwave minutes.
I will be picking up "Modern Times" on my next visit to the record shoppe. Looking foward to blasting it during the weekend.
echos myron like a siren
with endurance like the liberty bell
and he tells you of the dreamers
but he's cracked up like the road
and he'd like to lift us up, but we're a very heavy load
with endurance like the liberty bell
and he tells you of the dreamers
but he's cracked up like the road
and he'd like to lift us up, but we're a very heavy load
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Otis Westinghouse
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King Hoarse
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I've listened to it a couple of times and am just a little bit disappointed.
When I read Chronicles I was amazed that he could rememer all those verses that didn't make the cut for the Oh Mercy tracks. I remember thinking I was glad he kept a lot more for Time Out Of Mind and Love & Theft. Even though some of it's borrowed/stolen/clichés, his phrasing and well, experience, made it work, and I love those records. This time I'm not so sure. There's lyrical gems in almost every song, but with an average of 6+ minutes and lots of them sorta being 12 bar blues, some of the dead weight makes it hard for me to actively listen to the whole album. Also, the backing is pleasant enough but some more virtouso musicianship would be nice when the songs are as long as that.
From what I've downloaded from his recent tours his voice has been in terrible shape a lot of the time and I'm glad it doesn't show too much here. The vocal sound is clear enough to catch the nuances that make him a very good singer even though his register has never been this limited.
I feared that his recent faiblesse for singing low on every word but the last in every sentence would ruin this record but so far only Beyond the HorIZON really suffers from that. That melody is so annoying I can't even listen to it, but I'm sure the rest of the record will grow on me a lot.
Imho Working Man's Blues #2, Nettie Moore and Ain't Talkin' are on par with the last two records, the rest is about as good as Under The Red Sky, about half of which is very enjoyable.
When I read Chronicles I was amazed that he could rememer all those verses that didn't make the cut for the Oh Mercy tracks. I remember thinking I was glad he kept a lot more for Time Out Of Mind and Love & Theft. Even though some of it's borrowed/stolen/clichés, his phrasing and well, experience, made it work, and I love those records. This time I'm not so sure. There's lyrical gems in almost every song, but with an average of 6+ minutes and lots of them sorta being 12 bar blues, some of the dead weight makes it hard for me to actively listen to the whole album. Also, the backing is pleasant enough but some more virtouso musicianship would be nice when the songs are as long as that.
From what I've downloaded from his recent tours his voice has been in terrible shape a lot of the time and I'm glad it doesn't show too much here. The vocal sound is clear enough to catch the nuances that make him a very good singer even though his register has never been this limited.
I feared that his recent faiblesse for singing low on every word but the last in every sentence would ruin this record but so far only Beyond the HorIZON really suffers from that. That melody is so annoying I can't even listen to it, but I'm sure the rest of the record will grow on me a lot.
Imho Working Man's Blues #2, Nettie Moore and Ain't Talkin' are on par with the last two records, the rest is about as good as Under The Red Sky, about half of which is very enjoyable.
What this world needs is more silly men.
Saw Bobby and band last night. He played in Dutchess County as part of his minor league stadium tour (getting to be a summer time tradition). True to perverse form, he did not play a single song from the new record. His voice shot, all he did was croak, but his live band is terrific and saved the day.
Am loving this, "Spirit on the Water" is my early favourite and "Aint Talkin" is a classic.
Also am loving the DVD, great video for "Blood in My Eyes", from the wonderful "World Gone Wrong" record.
Also am loving the DVD, great video for "Blood in My Eyes", from the wonderful "World Gone Wrong" record.
echos myron like a siren
with endurance like the liberty bell
and he tells you of the dreamers
but he's cracked up like the road
and he'd like to lift us up, but we're a very heavy load
with endurance like the liberty bell
and he tells you of the dreamers
but he's cracked up like the road
and he'd like to lift us up, but we're a very heavy load