For totally half of Bob Dylan’s profession, his major focus has been the street. Because the late Eighties, he’s accomplished plus-or-minus 100 exhibits a yr, pandemic excepted. Alongside the best way, he’s been remaking his catalog, twisting the classics into drastic new shapes. He’d at all times accomplished that, in fact, from turning his people songs into electrical rock within the mid-Sixties, on right down to his notorious speed-snarl by means of “Masters of Warfare” on the Grammy Awards in 1991. That sense of fixed evolution additionally appears to have performed a task in shaking free his songwriting and record-making course of, beginning with Time Out of Thoughts in 1997. Listening to Dylan play yo-yo methods along with his personal music would grow to be the very cause to see him for a lot of of his most devoted followers — the type who wish to hear all the variations, as a result of they’re at all times completely different. His improvisational spontaneity has made him the alternative of an oldies act.
What makes his intimate new launch, Shadow Kingdom, a triumph is that it’s the last word model of each side of Dylan’s late profession. It brilliantly reinvents a few of his most iconic songs, whereas additionally feeling like a definitive recording itself. Shadow Kingdom was initially a streaming occasion obtainable for per week in July 2021. However this 54-minute reside efficiency was not the live performance particular many had anticipated. As a substitute, it was a movie of Dylan and Covid-masked actors miming to new studio recordings of some his most beloved songs, with an all-star group of backing musicians that included, amongst others, Don Was (upright bass), T Bone Burnett (guitar), and Greg Leisz (pedal metal, mandolin). Director Alma Har’el’s black-and-white filming frames Dylan and his onstage “band” strikingly — each participant is in most each shot, together with loads of the viewers, who’re dressed up like they’re hanging across the bar in Casablanca.
Now, the studio recordings of the songs that appeared in Shadow Kingdom have been collected for this album, proof that as placing because the movie was, it is a mission that was made for listening. The songs even segue collectively, each drifting into stray notes that shortly cohere into new patterns, like a DJ set or an exceptionally compact Grateful Lifeless present. The fabric right here skews towards the Nineteen Sixties, with three exceptions: “Eternally Younger,” from 1974’s Planet Waves, “What Was It You Needed?,” from 1989’s Oh Mercy, and a brand new instrumental nearer, “Sierra’s Theme.” However the powerfully understated preparations appear to return from someplace in time between the 2 World Wars, if not from earlier than the twentieth century started.
Even the electrical devices seem to barely be amplified. At occasions, the guitars on “Most Seemingly You’ll Go Your Method (And I’ll Go Mine)” sound like they don’t have resonator bins; it’s nonstop scrub-strumming towards Jeff Taylor’s lonesome (and really Gallic) squeezebox, which airily carries the chords. All through the complete album, Dylan’s singing is sly and effortlessly highly effective. His voice right here has physique, its tough edges cannily elided, his phrasing continually discovering new angles on lyrics that will as soon as have appeared nailed in place. “I’ll Be Your Child Tonight” seems like a drunken plea fairly than a lover-man come-on — not an sudden twist, however Taylor’s skeletal, forlorn enjoying provides depth to Dylan’s pathos.
Essentially the most drastic change-up will be the new model of “Tombstone Blues.” In 1965, the music rattled alongside at a manic tempo, Dylan’s supply daring the listener to maintain up, and giddy sufficient to power us to — the tombstone he’s singing about remains to be a great distance off, although it’s faintly seen. Right here the music is slowed to a wry crawl. The place the litany of names Dylan runs by means of within the lyrics — Brother Invoice, Ma Rainey, Cecil B. DeMille — as soon as gleamed like lit-up roadside indicators, right here they recommend a funeral discover. However that mordant, mortality-steeped feeling doesn’t carry the music down a bit. This barebones efficiency completely sparkles — a “Tombstone Blues” that’s a lot quieter than the unique, however so spry that it’s irresistible. It stands completely by itself, and so does the album it’s on.
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