Bob Dylan

Haunting and emotionally immense, Time Out of Mind resurrected Dylan's late career with a return to sprawling 12-bar blues and hazy, gravel-torn orations. After Dylan spent seven years without a record (and two decades without one of consequence), Time's anguished outlook made an evocative self-portrait of an artist on the fringe of irrelevance, which was perfectly paired with Daniel Lanois' ghostly production. The highlights -- dusky tunes like "Standing in the Doorway" and "Not Dark Yet" -- weren't so much the last gasps of a fading icon as they were a demonstration of Dylan's twilight powers.

There is a moment near the end of Bob Dylan's 41st album, Time Out of Mind, when the
Dylan of 35 years ago reappears. You know, the skinny kid with the hurricane hair and the
inscrutable smirk who blasted business as usual in the teeth? That guy. As the
16-minute-long "Highlands" detours from its verse-chorus-verse path to an extended
narrative bridge, the deadpan twang in Dylan's voice becomes more pronounce... More >

A soundscape as surely as Maxinquaye or The Ballad of Tom Joad, only more tuneful and less depressive--that is, merely bereft, rather than devoid of will or affect. Lyrically, it splits the difference between generalized El Lay schlock and minor Child ballad; a typical couplet goes, "You left me standing in the doorway crying/In the dark land of the sun." So the words are good enough except on the Billy Joel-covered "Make You Feel My Love," yet rarely what you come back for. The hooks are Dylan's spectral vocals--just his latest ventriloquist's trick, a new take on ancient, yet so real, so ordained--and a band whose quietude evokes the sleepy postjunk funk of Clapton's 461 Ocean Boulevard without the nearness of sex. Special kudos to Augie Meyers, the Al Kooper we've been waiting for. (Grade - A-)