Rating: 3 stars
Bob Dylan’s latest album, “Together Through Life” (Columbia), is the work of an artist who knows exactly what he wants to say, and how. He makes art that sounds like a conversation, like friends gathered in a room swapping stories with words and music.
“Together Through Life” marks Dylan’s third self-produced studio release in a row recorded with his road band, each increasingly modest and low-key. Like its predecessors, “Modern Times” (2006) and “Love and Theft” (2001), it presents Dylan’s wreck of a voice in a remarkably warm light. Dylan can’t hit the notes – high, low or in-between – but it almost doesn’t matter.
Of Dylan’s late-career albums, this is in the middle tier; it’s less a grand statement than a grainy snapshot of a major artist between stations. If nothing else, it affirms that Dylan at three-quarter speed has the charm of an irascible uncle who can tell stories all night long that entertain and haunt.
Dylan rejiggers the formula slightly: He cowrites songs with Robert Hunter, who was Jerry Garcia’s longtime lyricist in the Grateful Dead, and he beefs up his band with contributions from guitarist Mike Campbell (of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers) and David Hidalgo (of Los Lobos). Hidalgo’s accordion is in many ways the album’s most prominent instrument, and it imparts a border feel, both geographic and psychic. Dylan’s narrators (he claims in a recent interview that all of them are essentially extensions of himself) ponder a blood-stained world with poetic bleakness and black wit. They are caught in the penultimate chapter of a pulp novel, their fates about to take a life-changing turn. As he sings on “Forgetful Heart”: “The door has closed for ever more/If indeed there ever was a door.”
He preserves the aura of his live show with performances that feel spontaneous. His voice, ravaged though it may be, never strains; he sing-speaks his way through the songs, and the conversational ease he brings to his delivery makes his voice a lot easier to listen to than it should be. The volume is relatively muted, the interplay among the musicians subtle and swinging, without indulging the kind of instrumental flourishes that characterize Dylan’s most galvanizing live-band performances.
As usual, Dylan is fairly transparent about his source material. His music draws from a well deep in blues and mountain soul, embroidered with Tex-Mex accordion.
Drummer George Recile brings a Latin feel to the opening “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” which echoes Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac blues-rock classic “Black Magic Woman.” Like Green, Dylan moves in a shadowy underworld that suggests a lawless border town, a back-room card game, a surreal-as-she-goes David Lynch movie.
On “My Wife’s Home Town,” Dylan travels to hell on the back of Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” The singer channels not just Dixon’s melody, he imparts his own take on Chicago blues, with a deliciously sly vocal, topped off by a wicked cackle as he fades into the flames of a relationship turned murderous. John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” morphs into the dyspeptic “It’s All Good,” in which Dylan boogies on the grave of a world sinking in triteness. He also touches on French balladry (the now obligatory Dylan-tries-to-croon ballad, “Life is Hard”) and mariachi music (“This Dream of You”).
Dylan sounds comfortable cruising with this band, repudiating the bombast and the clutter of 21st Century rock and pop. That’s both praise and criticism, because “Together Through Life” never quite kicks into a higher gear. Heard at a distance, it suggests a toss-off from an artist who has done better work in the past.
He has. But he also has “the blood of the land in my voice,” as he sings in “I Feel a Change Comin’ On.” To quote another irascible iconoclast, a man’s got to know his limitations. And Dylan makes the most of his.
greg@gregkot.com
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