Chronicle #4: June 2020
Only 2 releases this time around, but that's because they're 2 big ones!
Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher
On one hand, it makes sense that this is as good as we can get. Phoebe Bridgers is the latest up-and-coming sensitive singer/songwriter who, with only 2 albums, already has a more present and passionate fan base than most other artists in her vein. And if you listen to her previous album, Stranger in the Alps, there are moments where her hype is justified-she knows how to use her husky delivery and can emote and express with a lot of nuance (her Ryan Adams spit-off “Motion Sickness” was as touching and crushing in its spite as indie folk could get in 2017), whatever scarce melodies we got were delicate in their approach and were well matched with the lyrical sentiment surrounding her vague musing regarding death, and its presentation never got too tiring or overwhelming. But the music (as always, the music) would tell another story; a more stilted, stagnant, complacent story that unfortunately played at odds with the sentiments expressed in the compositions-and if it was meant to be intentional, nothing interesting came of it. Always playing it safe enough that no one would dare question why there was such little life there.
And while there are moments on Punisher that one can say it escapes some of the traps of her previous offerings, they’re not quite enough to make this a satisfying listen as a whole. For most of the tracks-in particular the middle of the album, which mostly runs together-Phoebe stays in her usual mid-to-downtempo grooves, with enough clarity that you can hear and follow everything that’s going on, but with never any real grit or bite. While she may still be as good a songwriter as always, with a real capability of grasping mundane moments that only become important after they’re long gone (her remembrance of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” on “Moon Song” is particularly poignant), she’s still stuck in this lyrical space of weariness and disaffection that, when placed with her slow melodic cadence and turgid instrumentals, can become a slug real fast; most of the songs consist mainly of waiting for her to get to the point. And when the main point of it all is being stuck in loops of depression and codependency with others amidst a world that’s falling to pieces, the music rarely shows the bouts of anxiety and pain that lay in the subtext. At its worst, this is using depression as an aesthetic commodity, leaving behind all the aching that comes with it. It’s pleasant and clean. As easy as giving up.
But, just like Stranger in the Alps, it can’t fully be discarded immediately, because the moments where it does sound like something is going to erupt land, and suggest something better moving forward. “Kyoto” is her best song so far, probably because it’s her most melodic yet-from the Magnetic Fields-like synth motif to the horns that embellish the entire song, the hooks here are rich and elevate her lyrics, that call out an absent and neglectful dad while Phoebe tries to find herself “dreaming through Tokyo skies”. There’s an urgency here that wants to make every moment count even if they fade away immediately that’s incredibly welcome here. And in the final third of the album, there’s somehow a momentum built that jolts the album awake, from the coy power-pop of “ICU” (“But I feel something when I see you” is the most hopeful line on the album) to the beautiful three-part-harmonies of “Graceland Too” that suggest she could have a feasible lane on alternative country, and the second half of “The End Is Here” that, as needlessly pessimistic as it is, creates an atmosphere of uncertainty being shut down by the answers right in front of you (“It's a government drone or an alien spaceship/Either way, we're not alone” as horns start rising) until the end finally arrives, chaos ensues off-screen until it filters the main focus, and there’s nothing left but to accept the doom. A great section that, like the rest of the album, wasn’t afraid to get its hands a bit dirtier, lose its polishment, go that extra mile. If this review felt a bit too calculated and clinical, it’s because you can’t derive a lot of passion from this. Sleater-Kinney once asked, “Where’s the black and blue?”; we’re still looking for it, and it’s not here.
Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways
It’s very easy to call Dylan a genius. He’s not one, but it’s very easy to say that. He’s certainly leaned into that narrative throughout most of his career, he even does it on this album (“I'm first among equals/Second to none/The last of the best/You can bury the rest”), and it’s safe to say that a good chunk of his best work (Blonde on Blonde, his 1966 concerts, Blood on the Tracks, “Love and Theft”) were at least partially born out of Dylan secretly loving how the rest of the world put him on a pedestal. But deep down, he really is just a man, a man with a lot to say who almost immediately was turned into an icon and a representative of so many things he didn’t seem to want to be a part of. Ever since he saw the face of everything he stood up for being blown to pieces in late 1963, he’s always functioned outside of history, working through his own worldviews and giving into his eternal muse, the blues-if his world ever reflected ours, it was accidental and strange for anyone to really truly relate to, and his few, half-hearted attempts to mirror the rest of the world with 1976’s Desire and some of his mid-80s work were poor and fragile. The man once said he’d know his song well before he’d start singing, and that spirit hasn’t been lost.
So when we take a look at Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first offering of new material in 8 years after 3 albums of Sinatra covers (because that’s somehow exactly how someone like Dylan would spend the 2010s), it’s only fair to divide this into 2 parts-hell, the physical edition already does that for you. The first part consists of the main bulk of the album, the first 9 tracks, in which there’s an established sound and tone, and could easily have been the entire album. And then the second part consists solely of the 17-minute long epic, “Murder Most Foul”, in which… something else happens. A different mood, a different ambiance is set. The moment where this stops simply being another Dylan and becomes one of the most singular pieces of his entire discography.
But for now, that first act. Quite an uneven one, even if Dylan seems to not care whether the songs turn out good or bad, simply because of how much he’s enjoying playing and singing these songs-this may well be his finest vocal performance of his entire late era. He’s picked up a lot of melodic nuance from his Sinatra covers that he can jam into his very limited range, and he’s never too far gone to leave his character of a man beyond reproach who simply wants to let out what’s inside of him. He lets his cool, know-it-all preacher persona take over on a song as excellent as “False Prophet”, thinking he’s above everything else as if he’d seen it all before. He’s a truly commanding force on-possibly the best song on the album-“My Own Version of You”, where he nails the part of a mad scientist driven by an insane and desperate mission to gain back something that was lost. But he can also dial it back, take it slower, let the smoke of his voice fill up the room, like on “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” that may be one of the most delicate pieces of his late era (note his wonderful singing on “No one ever told meeeeee….” like gently turning into ether) or his more solemn take on acknowledging “Mother of Muses”, which makes him reflect on what’s been lost or forgotten.
Dylan seems to be as aware of his place in history as he could, but he also takes his opportunities to question it-the very first song, “I Contain Multitudes”, is a never-ending reflection stacked with pop references, as if he was making an extra effort to connect with those who will dismiss him out of hand, even treating a line as mundane as “I drive fast cars, and I eat fast foods” like a thesis statement on his persona. It’s nothing new that Dylan’s taken time to put to test-lyrically and musically-the heroes which he grew up with, and with songs like “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” he seems to be taking it a step further, bringing in the mythos of previous blues and folk legends and asking where someone like him would belong in them. Similarly in a song like “Mother of Muses”, even after all these years, he’s still asking and even demanding for inspiration that came to many men, both for the better and for the worse. For a man who’s always been content with being the legend that he is nothing else, it’s quite a sight to see him integrating himself into the big American narratives he creates; after all, like he says on “Key West”, he was born outside of the tracks, like Beat Generation poets and the early rock’n’roll legends.
All these themes that would be so much more rewarding if the music itself was as invested as the words were. Not to say that it sounds bad-far from it, the sounds and the playing are fantastic; the band Dylan has assembled is pristine, stable and his production mostly gets out of the way so that the textures brought to the table are able to shine and thrive. The establishing of the menacing blues groove of “False Prophet” is what makes the song roar as much as it does, and the hiding and internal scheming of “My Own Version of You” feel like they’re constantly about to surprise you, before they lurk back into the shadows. But although there’s no moment in which the band fails, the moments where they get to shine are few-for the most part, they get stuck with the basic, established groove and rarely get the chance to move away from them, which makes most of these instrumentals to be stilted and stiff, even passionless at times. This becomes a problem especially when most of these songs are longer than they can afford to be-a common issue with late-era Dylan-, which can make this turn into a suffocating listen. The 2 worst offenders are, unfortunately, the final 2 tracks on the first disc,“Crossing the Rubicon” and “Key West”; both these songs drag and crawl without wanting to go anywhere, and it’s that lack of ambition that ruins them. And it’d be one thing if they were short ditties, but when they last 7 and 9 minutes respectively, they put a halt on an album that already didn’t have much traction in its speed. Most of it is already rooted in midtempo blues riffs, and stretching them out for as long as they do eventually ends up causing damage.
But that’s exactly why we’re separating this album into 2 parts because “Murder Most Foul”, by far the longest song on this album (and Dylan’s career) lasting 17 minutes, is its own different beast, in which the meandering attributes of the rest of Rough and Rowdy Ways end up working to its favor. The characteristic blues of Dylan’s current sound is suddenly gone, replaced by a quasi-new age ambiance of pianos and scattered strings that may well be a film reel rolling through, in which the scratches and burns are replaced by intermediate drums; it’s watching found footage in an empty screen, knowing how the movie goes but still finding yourself surprised anyway. A perfect backdrop for Dylan’s patchy barricade of words, who seem to be sung (or spoken) with much affection and care, like little children being released by their parents into the world. And the picture they paint is well known: a dark day in Dallas, November ‘63, “a day that will live on in infamy”. Dylan heads straight into the JFK assassination, the moment that changed him and his entire generation, and the found feelings are multiple. A lot to appreciate from the get-go, from the initial chuckled line “Good day to be livin' and a good day to die” to the mundanity in which he describes the event itself (“He said, ‘Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?’/’Of course we do, we know who you are’/Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car”) but most importantly, how after the first verse, the world explodes.
The song goes from a solid retelling of a crucial moment in US history to a demonstration of said moment’s importance-suddenly the song becomes fragmented, disperse, it dissipates into cultural references ranging from the Beatles to Gone with the Wind to Woodstock to (going back and forth and back and forth), like if everything that came before and after it coalesced and changed its meaning forevermore, now a whirlwind of detached history that looks for another center to hold on to can’t seem to find it. Anytime the song seems to find a core, an ideal, a belief to grasp (“But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at/For the last fifty years they've been searchin' for that”), it gets cut off before something can be properly built (“I said the soul of a nation been torn away/And it's beginning to go into a slow decay”). The song is as close to a deconstruction of a world gone wrong since at least “Visions of Johanna”.
And in the final 2 verses, the song takes yet another shift. To show that lack of control, that hysteria, Dylan turns to the most universal and accessible languages of all: music. Pop music. The song slowly turns into a playlist of sorts that doesn’t let up in its variety-from Nina Simone and Etta James to Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker to Queen and Fleetwood Mac-and builds a scenario of sketched out heroes, whose souls, forgotten or not, have played in the creation of the modern American ethos. History told through their eyes… and his eyes too. Because right at the very end, the final line, “Play ‘Murder Most Foul’”... one of the most revealing and spiritful lines Dylan’s ever written. A man finally acknowledging his place in history and inserting himself, all of himself, into it, joining the long-gone spirit. It’s a bleak look into what he helped shape has become, and it’s not one that offers any real hope for the future-but at least it’s able to find some kind of comfort into what’s been; it’s nostalgia as self-critical as it can get. Although Dylan may not be a genius per se, he is in history’s eyes-we just have to look into who writes said history. So with that in mind, play Freewheelin’. Play “Percy’s Song”. Play Another Side. Play Blonde on Blonde. Play Live at the “Royal Albert Hall”. Play New Morning. Play Rolling Thunder Revue. Play “Brownsville Girl”. Play fucking Oh Mercy if you feel like it. Play “Things Have Changed”. Play Modern Times. Play his Sinatra covers? Hmm, you can probably skip those. But do play Rough and Rowdy Ways. Play “Murder Most Foul”.