Bob Dylan - new album just out on Tidal - Rough and Rowdy Ways

Right @tostadosunidos, Moondog Matinee included some of the songs The Band were performing in their sets while playing bars as The Hawks (1960-65, pre-Dylan). Great versions of those songs, and since the album is intended to reproduce that era, I don't mind the recorded sound quality, which is not so hot: no high end, congested and veiled, but the music moves me anyway. 

It's an unlikely question but it's one I have been asking myself lately, is this Bib Dylan's best album? 

For sure the range of vocal and musical expression found here is not a patch on that found on his best work eg the drug fuelled 65-6 trilogy that altered the course of popular music.

He's much older now and the band, excellent players no doubt, are here to provide a solid, consistent, pulsing, hypnotic landscape for his words.

No flashy or fancy stuff here at all.

Lyrically there is a lot of disillusionment, regret, bitterness, anger, reflection from start to finish, only occasionally softened with rare hints of humour. It's often overlooked but Dylan always had humour.

His vision here is on history, mortality, loss of reason, rejuvenation and hope for redemption. I can't recall any other album of his with such an encyclopedic compass of subject matter and sensation. 

Even those peaks of 2012s Tempest or 2001s Love and Theft hardly managed such a kaleidoscopic distillation as this one. This one broke me down further and make me think more. 

The final track, Murder Most Foul comes packaged on a separate CD, quite rightly so. It stands alone in more ways than one.

Broad, majestic and all encompassing it's a work of the highest maturity. 


As for the recording quality, its simply first rate - warm and full of texture and decay. It sounds good on everything I've played it on - TV, headphones, Bluetooth speaker etc.

Of course it sounds better on a full range system, bigger scale, depth and bandwidth, intimacy etc, but then that's no more than what you'd expect from an artist who genuinely cares about how his work is displayed.

It's also available for a free listen on Dylan's own YouTube channel. 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kqAopNs8YTdcVv-aTY0fBZqiEWI4jmtgI

I prefer his drug fueled trilogy over his scripture fueled trilogy. But my favorite trilogy is the one with Modern Times. 

..."these pretzels are making me thirsty!"......

I've been listening to this album for a couple of weeks on Tidal and have gone to not liking it that much to liking it a lot.  The vinyl just came out today so I bought it.  Special gold vinyl indie store exclusive at that.  I'm excited to sit down with it tonight.  
As for his voice, he has more character in his voice than almost any other singer out there.  Some records are much more listenable to me than others.  Ironically, his late-career records are some of my favorites.