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If I asked Mr. D for a good reason to hear him again, I would receive a fussy and incomprehensible mutter with clenched lips, from the usual jerky face that graces the cardboard cutouts in record stores. Fifty years of career might be too much for anyone.
He has come back too soon, and I don't deny that it somehow annoys me, almost not wanting to confront the unconscious devotion I have towards the Artist, not wanting to question it in the likely event that I decide to leave his record there, next to the X-Factor compilations.
I wander through the shop up and down and before leaving, I pick it up, staring at his tired eyes looking at me from the cardboard. - "At least I like the cover" - I think.
Without expecting anything (or maybe yes, I was ready to be bored), I put it on, and "Beyond Here Lies Nothing" starts, (this here), a pulled blues that highlights a fact that will later prove salient: the voice is that of the last records, hoarse and slightly husky, but the way Dylan uses it makes it pleasant, perfectly chiselled with the music that has become rougher, more vital.
There is a heart that pulses, beats, behind songs that are decidedly less weary compared to the usual expressive spectrum to which Robert Zimmerman's latest works accustomed us (and the previous, monotonous "Modern Times" was no exception).
But the greater freshness of the album isn’t made up of simple cosmetic factors, but of finally high-level writing, inspired, varied. Dylan fills and colors the words without creating the usual gap between lyrics and vocal intonation, in my opinion, the real Achilles' heel of his latest incarnations, where monotone croaks sailed over skeletal blues dragged without conviction.
There’s the blues, the frontier, the essentiality of his refined and immutable musical primitivism, which rejects all popular music trends of the last (by now) three decades. As if wanting to rewrite with rationality what instinct and creative impulse had thrown onto the fiery '60s; a reappropriation of what had become independent, the "waste" of every artistic production process.
And Dylan plays himself better than anyone else, the dark "Forgetful Heart", with the electric insinuating itself among fears and anxieties, from metaphysical blues, and the unusually noisy jolts of "Jolene" and "Shake Shake Mama" are summarizing the backbone of the album.
But when the rhythms slow down, in the meditative and bittersweet "Life Is Hard" and in the splendid and moving "This Dream Of You" (which brings back memories of the distant "Desire"), you feel what’s new, the soul of Dylan's art once again alive and clear.
The rest are roars, sweat, and even that enthusiasm that makes even the umpteenth citation lively, (an "I Feel A Change Comin On" has been heard dozens of times) and the idea that Dylan is no longer (or not) the artist to follow, but simply to observe: he continues to be there, and his music is the continuous manifestation of it, like breathing, album after album.
If he then comes out with his best work since "Time Out Of Mind", there's also (definitely) reason to rejoice.
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