“Tempest” isn’t as revelatory as “Love and Theft,” from 2001, or “Modern Times,” from 2006, the benchmarks of Dylan’s late period. But it’s as spirited and vigorous an album as he’s made. It’s his longest one, clocking in at sixty-eight-minutes-plus; the title track, the song about the Titanic, is a Celtic-tinged waltz that runs nearly fourteen minutes and has forty-five verses. “Tempest” may also be Dylan’s randiest record; like his namesake Dylan Thomas, Bob is not going gently.“I’m not dead yet / My bells still rings,” he sings over the Bo Diddley stomp of “Early Roman Kings,” a song packed with hair-raising boasts: “I’ll dress up your wounds / With a blood-clotted rag / I ain’t afraid to make love / If you a bitch or a hag.” The younger Dylan was coy about sex, wrapping his come-ons in surreal wordplay or, when so inclined, playing the courtly gent. (“Shut the light, shut the shade / You don’t have to be afraid.”)
Today, he minces no words:
I got a heavy-stacked woman
With a smile on her face
And she has crowned my soul with grace.
I’m still hurtin’ from an arrow
That pierced my chest.
I’m gonna have to take my head
And bury it between her breasts.
For Dylan, the little death leads, inevitably, to thoughts of the big kind.
Bob Dylan's New Album, "Tempest," Reviewed / The New Yorker /more
No comments:
Post a Comment