Monday, 6 July 2020
Sunday, 5 July 2020
Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways, album review
There are enough knowing and detailed reviews out there for me to defer. My core observation is that this is a mesmerising listen, what Dylan has called his 'trance' music, and it is in the incantation-drive of the rolling and/or pulsing musical lines, sometimes quite sweetly melodic, accompanied by the rhythm of the poetry, those rhyming couplets that shout their simple chimes before arrival and how this tugs us to them. The voice too, gravitas over gravel - the latter an annoyance around for quite awhile - but here the perfect trance-voice to convey the emotive, even over meaning if the lyric isn't immediately absorbed. For those of my generation, the references/touchstones are echos as much as anything else, and this pulls us in as well.
Friday, 3 July 2020
Willie Nelson - First Rose of Spring, album review
Twee album cover; wonderfully reflective content.
Mainly a covers album, Nelson adds not
just his signature sound but a history that imbues all with depths of
experience and understanding.
The album title opener is as plaintive as a wailing
harmonica can be in accompanying emotive pedal steel. That Nelson covers the
Chris Stapleton penned Our Song is a
superb reverse tribute, and Willie’s lifetime ‘with living’ adds its own
colossal narrative. The closer cover of Yesterday
When I was Young says it all.
This isn’t maudlin and has an accepting lament inherent in
the reflection on aging and change, as in the Nelson/Cannon penned second track
Blue Star where ‘the same old me and
you’ asserts what does remain constant in this process.
