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▌────── Release Info ───────────────── ▐▌ ──────────────── ▌ ──────── ▐
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Originally released : 08-29-2006
Release date : 03-08-2007
Album name : Modern Times
Artist : Bob Dylan
Ripped by : Team EOS
Genre : Blues
Label : Columbia
Encoding Software : Lame EOS
Quality : -V 2
Tracks : 10
Size of Files : 87,3 MB
─ Track list ───────────────────────────────────────── ─── ─ ─
01 05:55 Thunder On The Mountain
02 07:43 Spirit On The Water
03 06:02 Rollin' And Tumblin'
04 05:04 When The Deal Goes Down
05 04:56 Someday Baby
06 06:07 Workingman's Blues
07 05:36 Beyond The Horizon
08 06:53 Nettie Moore
09 05:43 The Levee's Gonna Break
10 08:48 Ain't Talkin'
Total time: 62:47 min
─ Release notes ─────────────────────────────────────── ─── ─ ─
When Bob Dylan dropped Time Out of Mind in 1997, it was
a rollicking rockabilly and blues record, full of sad
songs about mortality, disappointment, and dissolution.
2001 brought Love and Theft, which was also steeped in
stomping blues and other folk forms. It was funny,
celebratory in places and biting in others. Dylan has
been busy since then: he did a Victoria's Secret
commercial, toured almost nonstop, was in a couple
films -- Larry Charles' Masked and Anonymous and Martin
Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home -- and
published the first of a purported three volumes of his
cagey, rambling autobiography, Chronicles. Lately, he's
been thinking about Alicia Keys. This last comment
comes from the man himself in "Thunder on the
Mountain," the opening track on Modern Times, a
barn-burning, raucous, and unruly blues tune that finds
the old man sounding mighty feisty and gleefully
agitated: "I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys/Couldn't
keep from cryin'/She was born in Hell's Kitchen and I
was livin' down the line/I've been lookin' for her even
clear through Tennessee." The drums shuffle with
brushes, the piano is pumping like Jerry Lee Lewis, the
bass is popping, and a slide guitar that feels like
it's calling the late Michael Bloomfield back from 1966
-- α la Highway 61 Revisited -- slips in and out of the
ether like a ghost wanting to emerge in the flesh.
Dylan's own choppy leads snarl in the break and he's
letting his blues fall down like rain: "Gonna raise me
an army, some tough sons of bitches/I'll recruit my
army from the orphanages/ I've been to St. Herman's
church and said my religious vows/I sucked the milk out
of a thousand cows/I got the pork chop, she got the
pie/She ain't no angel and neither am I...I did all I
could/I did it right there and then/I've already
confessed I don't need to confess again."
Thus begins the third part of Dylan's renaissance
trilogy (thus far, y'all). Modern Times is raw; it
feels live, immediate, and in places even shambolic.
Rhythms slip, time stretches and turns back on itself,
and lyrics are rushed to fit into verses that just
won't stop coming. Dylan produced the set himself under
his Jack Frost moniker. Its songs are humorous and
cryptic, tender and snarling. What's he saying? We
don't need to concern ourselves with that any more than
we had to Willie Dixon talking about backdoor men or
Elmore James dusting his broom. Dylan's blues are
primitive and impure. Though performed by a crackerjack
band, they're played with fury; the singer wrestles
down musical history as he spits in the eye of the
modern world. But blues isn't the only music here.
There are parlor songs such as "Spirit on the Water,"
where love is as heavenly and earthly a thing as exists
in this life. The band swings gently and carefree, with
Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball playing slippery -- and
sometimes sloppy -- jazz chords as Tony Garnier's bass
and George Receli's sputtering snare walk the beat.
Another, "When the Deal Goes Down," tempts the listener
into thinking that Dylan is aping Bing Crosby in his
gravelly, snake-rattle voice. True, he's an unabashed
fan of the old arch mean-hearted crooner. But it just
ain't Bing, because it's got that true old-time swing.
Dylan's singing style in these songs comes from the
great blues and jazzman Lonnie Johnson (whose version
of the Grosz and Coslow standard "Tomorrow Night" he's
been playing for years in his live set). If you need
further proof, look to Johnson's last recordings done
in the late '50s and early '60s ("I Found a Dream" and
"I'll Get Along Somehow"), or go all the way back to
the early years for "Secret Emotions," and "In Love
Again," cut in 1940. It is in these songs where you
will find the heart of Dylan's sweet song ambition and
also that unique phrasing that makes him one of the
greatest blues singers and interpreters ever. Dylan
evokes Muddy Waters in "Rollin' and Tumblin." He swipes
the riff, the title, the tune itself, and uses some of
the words and adds a whole bunch of his own. Same with
his use of Sleepy John Estes in "Someday Baby".. Those
who think Dylan merely plagiarizes miss the point.
Dylan is a folk musician; he uses American folk forms
such as blues, rock, gospel, and R&B as well as lyrics,
licks, and/or whatever else he can to get a song
across. This tradition of borrowing and retelling goes
back to the beginning of song and story. Even the title
of Modern Times is a wink-eye reference to a film by
Charlie Chaplin. It doesn't make Dylan less; it makes
him more, because he contains all of these songs within
himself. By his use of them, he adds to their secret
histories and labyrinthine legends. Besides, he's been
around long enough to do anything he damn well pleases
and has been doing so since the beginning.
Modern Times expresses emotions and comments upon
everything from love ("When the Deal Goes Down,"
"Beyond the Horizon") to mortality ("The Levee's Gonna
Break," "Ain't Talkin") to the state of the world --
check "Workingman's Blues #2," where Dylan sings gently
about the "buyin' power of the proletariat's gone
down/Money's getting shallow and weak...they say low
wages are reality if we want to compete abroad." But in
the next breath he's put his "cruel weapons on the
shelf" and invites his beloved to sit on his knee. It's
a poignant midtempo ballad that walks the line between
the topical songs of Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie to
the love songs of Stephen Foster and Leadbelly. One can
feel both darkness and light struggling inside the
singer for dominance. But in his carnal and spiritual
imagery and rakish honesty, he doesn't give in to
either side and walks the hardest path -- the "long
road down" to his own destiny. This is a storyteller, a
pilgrim who's seen it all; he's found it all wanting;
he's found some infinitesimal take on the truth that
he's holding on to with a vengeance. In the midst of
changes that are foreboding, Modern Times is the sound
of an ambivalent Psalter coming in from the storm,
dirty, bloodied, but laughing at himself -- because he
knows nobody will believe him anyway.
Dylan digs deep into the pocket of American song past
in "Nettie Moore," a 19th century tune from which he
borrowed the title, the partial melody, and first line
of its chorus. He also uses words by W.C. Handy and
Robert Johnson as he extends the meaning of the tome by
adding his own metaphorical images and wry
observations. However, even as the song is from
antiquity, it's full of the rest of Modern Times
bemusement. "The Levee's Gonna Break" shakes and
shimmies as it warns about the coming catastrophe.
Coming as it does on the anniversary of Hurricane
Katrina, it's a particularly poignant number that
reveals apocalypse and redemption and rails on the
greedy and powerful as it parties in the gutter. There
are no sacred cows -- when Dylan evokes Carl Perkins'
exhortation to put "your cat clothes on," it's hard not
to stomp around maniacally even as you feel his
righteousness come through. The great irony is in the
final track, "Ain't Talkin'," where a lonesome fiddle,
piano, and hand percussion spill out a gypsy ballad
that states a yearning, that amounts to an unsatisfied
spiritual hunger. The pilgrim wanders, walks, and
aspires to do good unto others, though he falters often
-- he sometimes even wants to commit homicide. It's all
part of the "trawl" of living in the world today.
Dylan's simmering growl adds a sense of apprehension,
of whistling through the graveyard, with determination
to get to he knows not where -- supposedly it's the
other side of the world. The guitar interplay with the
fiddle comes through loud and clear in the bittersweet
tune. It's like how "Beyond the Horizon" uses gypsy
melodies and swing to tenderly underscore the
seriousness in the words. It sends the album off with a
wry sense of foreboding. This pilgrim is sticking to
the only thing he knows is solid -- the motion of his
feet.
Modern Times portrays a new weird America, even
stranger than the old one, because it's merely part of
a world consumed by insanity. In these ten songs, bawdy
joy, restless heartache, a wild sense of humor, and
bottomless sadness all coexist and inform one another
as a warning and celebration of this precious human
life while wondering openly about what comes after.
This world view is expressed through musical and
lyrical forms that are threatened with extinction: old
rickety blues that still pack an electrically charged
wallop, porch and parlor tunes, and pop ballads that
could easily have come straight from the 1930s via the
1890s, but it also wails and roars the blues. Modern
Times is the work of a professional mythmaker, a
back-alley magician, and a prophetic creator of
mischief. He knows his characters because he's been
them all and can turn them all inside out in song: the
road-worn holy man who's also a thief; the
tender-hearted lover who loves to brawl; the poetic
sage who's also a pickpocket; and the Everyman who
embodies them all and just wants to get on with it. On
Modern Times, all bets are off as to who finishes the
race dead last, because that's the most interesting
place to be: "Meet me at the bottom, don't lag
behind/Bring me my boots and shoes/You can hang back or
fight your best on the frontline/Sing a little bit of
these workingman blues." There is nothing so intriguing
as contradiction and Dylan offers it with knowing
laughter and tears, because in his songs he displays
that they are both sides of the same coin and he never
waffles, because he's on the other side of the looking
glass. Modern Times is the work of an untamed artist
who, as he grows older, sees mortality as something to
accept but not bow down to, the sound that refuses to
surrender to corruption of the soul and spirit. It's
more than a compelling listen; it's a convincing one.
Sidenote: This review is longer than the damn album.
─ Contact ───────────────────────────────────────────── ─── ─ ─
Contact us @ : #eos (efnet)
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