Bob Dylan - Fallen Angels

Drowned In Sound 70

Eventually, and inevitably, Dylan got his way: he’s been ‘robbing the same banks’ since the legendary Never-ending Tour began in 1988. What Roberts didn’t envisage in that conversation was that Dylan would manage to make himself professionally available through touring, recording, a memoir and a regular radio show without sacrificing an inch of mystique. Some stars are enigmatic for obvious reasons. Prince, for instance, with his mythological Paisley Park kept a nervous distance from prying eyes and minds. Or Kate Bush with her rare releases and inexplicably rarer performances engenders mystery. But Dylan’s always around; regularly releasing records, and permanently touring. He’s a tangible figure who’s existence can be felt easily for those that wish to be in the presence of it. And yet there is still so much that is unknowable about this legend of popular music, despite this wealth of product.

The most significant incident in his memoirs maybe holds the key to this elusive artist. The motorcycle accident that shocked him to his core left him feeling disconnected to the path he had set out on. His response to the uncertainty was just to crack on and be a musician with work-man-like commitment, and thus the legendary tour began.

In many senses that's just what he is doing with Fallen Angels; his job. In Chronicles he grows tired of lyrics, and the way he believes his get misconstrued. That distance could easily be applied to this record of covers, were it not for the authenticity of feeling found within its recreation of these classic songs. This is Dylan at his most tender, and vocally as smooth as he’s ever been or ever likely to be. The familiarity of tracks like ‘It had to be you’, you might wager, would jar in the hands of his gravel-voiced expression. But they don’t, Dylan takes a gentle and reverent approach.

Musically, most of the tunes are backed by solid and fairly minimal instrumentation. The guitar on ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ gently laps against Dylan’s warm entreaties. He isn’t making radical changes to these standards, but a song like this does take on an almost weary longing that is absent in Ray Charles’ slick and confident delivery of the same composition.

Fallen Angels is an album that sounds like Dylan at his most vulnerable. His struggle to satisfyingly reach some of the notes on ‘All The Way’ sound, doesn't register as a musical failure, but rather an artist unguarded and are surprisingly touching. Moments like these seem like a far cry from the vicious delivery of protest songs like ‘Masters of War’, which are almost spat rather than sang.

Dylan wrote, 'a song is like a dream, and you try and make it come true.' And it feels like he is conjurer of dreams on this record. There’s a soft commitment to the gently uptempo 'That Old Black Magic’ that charms you into believing every word. Again it’s hard to imagine this was the same fella that fashioned the barbed, bitter sentiments of ‘Idiot Wind.’

And I suppose there lies the rub. This is an endearingly sentimental charming record from a pioneer of protest and raw meditations on love. No one's gonna get an erection over it, and it’ll very likely divide. But then Bob Dylan has always embraced contrasts. His work-like approach might seem mercenary at times, his outlook so often cynical and his distance cold, but even on songs written by others, he can’t hide his humanity. Maybe that’s where his mystery lies, as his intentions are never knowable. Rather than playing the same bars he’s actually always dangling a carrot, and this time with the tenderest of touches.

Pitchfork 64

You can go all the way back to the beginning of “What the fuck is Bob Dylan doing now?” and find jazz. “Peggy Day” from Nashville Skyline—his first detour into melodic crooning—is snappy Western swing; following that was Self Portrait’s notorious take on Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” and New Morning’s hepcat pastiche, “If Dogs Run Free.” Dylan’s earliest Frank Sinatra tribute dates back five decades and only found its first official release in 2014: the addled Basement Tapes-era riff on the Johnny Mercer classic “One for My Baby (One More for the Road).”

None of this, however, made the advent of his Standards Period last year any less of a surprise. Some of the initial shock was the result of the growing stigma around the aging-rocker-does-the-American-songbook format, not the fact that Dylan would offer his own version. As he himself acknowledged in his labyrinthine Musicares acceptance speech last year, this sort of record has become a convention—a profitable one. At this point, any new release in this vein scans as something more sordid than a stocking-stuffer: an empty money grab.

Dylan’s particular, oddball point in bringing up the trend was to illustrate the absurd degree to which he was still viewed as a man apart. Why did people pore over Shadows in the Night any more than Rod Stewart’s latest compilation? “In their reviews no one says anything,” Dylan demurred. “In my reviews, they’ve got to look under every stone and report about it.”

But his point doesn’t quite land. After all, Shadows, and Dylan’s second standards set, Fallen Angels, don’t bear much resemblance to the market standard. The latter’s arrangements recall a time and place that never existed—a mythical dive halfway between a resurrected smoky East Village club and, when drooping pedal steel figures dominate the action, a Texas barroom. When creaky cellos and horn soloists crop up, Tom Waits’ more muted '00s output comes to mind. But this atmosphere sounds like a byproduct of who could make it to the session, how much rehearsal they had time for between tour dates, what Dylan ate yesterday; it doesn’t come over as carefully cultivated.

Dylan doesn’t put a clear twist on this music; it twists him. Devotees judge performers of early–20th-century standards on their ability to interpret—whether they can shape and communicate a song’s meaning with some degree of musical cleverness. But Dylan simply delivers them. In the process, he tends to draw out the strangeness inherent in the compositions rather than making them sound effusive and natural. On opener “Young at Heart,” the close rhyme schemes and overstuffed lines (“Look at all you’ll derive out of being alive…”) draw attention to themselves. On the ubiquitous “Come Rain or Come Shine,” there’s so much precedent for logical ways to approach this song that one can't help but feel like Dylan is deliberately trying to muck it up. “We’re in or we’re out of the money” is faxed out mechanically, the contrast inherent in the line absent.

The languid pacing—often, as down-tempo you could reasonably take these songs—often improves matters. So while Dylan’s breezy take on Hoagy Carmichael’s greatest triumph “Skylark” is a dead-eyed, aberrant disaster, his pliable, conversational intro to the Casablanca/When Harry Met Sally…-famous “It Had to Be You” feels inviting. But some shifts in pacing work. Blonde on Blonde’s amphetamines are a things of decades past, but perhaps some young engineer handed Dylan his first 5-hour Energy to carry off “That Old Black Magic," Angels’ closest thing to a barnburner. Here, words spring off Dylan’s lips, rather than becoming saltwater in his throat; his ever-odder, geographically indeterminate accent stays out of the way. He chuckles a bit on the final triumphant release, as if he’s stunned even himself.

The axioms in the songs on Fallen Angels were written to speak to various familiar moments of the human experience. With Dylan, though, the universal “truth” in these compositions—that word is littered throughout his Musicares tirade—doesn’t reflect easily, or even deliberately uneasily, back on him. In his muse Sinatra’s case, of course, such truth came easy: The singer was at the bar until last call in both the tabloids and on his albums, probably bemoaning Ava Gardner’s latest tryst. But there’s no clear through-line to Fallen Angels’ subject matter, no point of view.

The final product, then, feels adrift: just off the coast of delivering a discrete emotional impact, offering a sporadic, self-reflexive charm for fans who smile at Dylan’s every left turn, whether in spite of themselves or on principle. In other words, it’s a new Dylan album: the product of a life ritual no one can fathom, but which is doubtless way more typical than one might think; perennially modest; worth a faithful fan’s money.

The Guardian 60

(Columbia)

The meeting of grizzled musical icon and great American songbook has yielded variable results, but Dylan got it right with last year’s Shadows in the Night, his take on songs once sung by Frank Sinatra. He shows the same sure hand and musician’s affection here for a collection of standards by writers such as Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. His vocals are engaging, the arrangements are sensitive and spare – gently brushed drums and steel guitar on Polka Dots and Moonbeams, dabs of strings on Skylark – and the whole thing drifts along with an easygoing charm. No one involved seems to be trying too hard, just basking in the pleasure of classic songs classily performed.