Lucinda Williams: Essence. From the very first this sounded
better than Car Wheels on a Gravel Road -- she has achieved an
astonishing vocal clarity and sincerity, despite or perhaps because of her
quaver. So while comparison listening concedes that Car Wheels has
more ambitious and sweeping songs, she puts this more first-person batch
over on sheer conviction. Nor are the songs trifles: "Out of Touch is no
less than the flip side to "We Have the Technology" (Pere Ubu). The only
thing I want to know is why she shied away from "Get Right With God" when
she played Wichita.
Bob Dylan: Love and Theft. Every review starts with "the
best Dylan album since . . ." -- you'd think some smartass would fill
in the blank with Time Out of Mind, his equally acclaimed but
quickly forgotten 1997 comeback. Even today it seems obligatory to
refactor everything Dylan does in terms of his classics, yet doing
so yields little more than hyperbole. It might be better to refactor
his past in terms of where he is now, for what Love and Theft
really is is his most entertaining album . . . ever. The improvement
over Time Out of Mind is easy to spot: the music's looser and
the lyrics are not only memorable, they're delightful. ("Why don't
you break my heart one more time, just for good luck?") But this is
hardly a huge leap forward; the fact is that damn near everything
Dylan has done since, roughly, The Traveling Wilburys (1988)
has been pretty good. This should have been easier to spot: despite
all the erstwhile stars in the Wilburys, it was blatantly obvious
that the only real talent there was Dylan. But where the Wilburys
ruse gave Dylan the opportunity to pretend he was not The Oracle, it's
taken over a decade for him to shake his myth. The clue here is that
while Time Out of Mind harkened back to Blonde on Blonde,
all the way down to the interminable finale, there are no past models
for Love and Theft. Perhaps Dylan always was just a songster.
What's so wrong with that?