Bob Dylan - Shadows In The Night (Part 2)

I'm right there with you

 

I love this album....there's a warmth and sincerity there. As well as a fragility. It is a thing of beauty as far as I'm concerned.

 

These instant analyses and historical rankings happen with every new Dylan release and rarely hold up. I recall, for example, when Tempest was anointed here by many an album for all time. Every track was hotly debated and deemed to be a masterpiece. As for the new one, I like it a lot. How does it rank historically? Don't know or care.

 

FWIW, I think Tempest is really a great album. Just listened to in a couple of days ago for the first time in a long time. That one really IS one of Dylan's best records I think. Under appreciated.

 

Tempest is highly rated and justly so. A magnificent work. I do get the impression L&T is regarded by many as even better but I'd question that assessment. I often wonder if their release dates were switched would the critical mass view Tempest as the better of the 2. L&T effectively unveiled the Jack Frost model and perhaps holds a greater number of hearts as a result.

 

I like this album quite a bit. I haven't liked the arrangements on recent Dylan records very much, what with the blues guitar licks and accordions honking away, and the spareness of this record really allows his vocals (which are great) to shine. I'd love to see an album of originals with the exact same set-up.

 

I really like Love and Theft, and absolutely loved it at the time (even though my memory of it is colored by on my way to work stepping out of the record store with it, newly purchased and playing on a portable CD player, onto madison avenue first thing in the morning of Sept. 11 2001 and wondering why everyone on the street was on their cell phones crying and looking downtown). Years later though, I think Tempest might be a better record from start to finish.

 

Has Sean Murdock weighed in on this album yet?? Where the heck are ya Sean?

@SeanMurdock

 

Finally getting a chance to spin the vinyl tonight. Love the music! Side 1 is super noisy though, side 2 not at all. Even after a thorough clean. Anyone else have the same issue?

 

I'm a huge fan of Dylan, as well as a huge fan of Rachmaninoff, so you can only imagine how excited I was to hear a Rachmaninoff melody on a Dylan album. I was not familiar with the song "Full Moon and Empty Arms" before this album. I'll probably be listening to this album every morning for a few months.

 

Hi Bob F:
This box set :
A Voice in Time 1939-1952 (4-CD box)
just arrived in the mail today, so my weekend is all set! Thanks for the tip!

 

I was on both sides of this as a Billboard Reporter for a large chain store, then as a rep for a label. It was a .....unique relationship on either side, but gosh it was fun!!!

 

Him closing his shows with a song from it last fall - which I think was the first time he's featured unreleased music from a forthcoming album in 25 years or so - would suggest to me he likes these songs and will do a healthy selection of them. One never knows, of course. If he adds new songs to the template he's been using on tour you might want to make sure you have Tempest as well as it's been featured heavily in the setlists. If you're not sure whether to go, I have seen many, many people say a recent show was the best they'd seen in X years...and based on my own 2014 show experience he's in great form: there wasn't a single head-scratcher all night.

 

I've been to 19 Bob Dylan shows from 1987 to 2014. When I saw him last fall, having not caught a show for about three years prior to that, he was better than when I saw him in 2003-2004, easily. I don't know how a person his age manages to improve on their overall performance, spanning a decade's time, but that's what Bob has done. He's gotten even better in his old age. He's a force of nature. Hopefully they'll still play the 'Tempest' setlist with some variation to it. I can't imagine Bob would completely turn the show around, and do a bunch of SITN songs, over what they've been currently playing, just because the current set list has been so well received, but you never really know what Bob will do next....

 

But then Elvis took every opportunity to trash Dylan's voice I believe.

 

In a joking kind of way, maybe, and why not? Presley was the greatest r'n'r singer of all time, he could snub anyone and get away with it. Dylan has never had a traditional singing voice and I say this as a long-time fan and listener. He's a great vocalist at times but he's lazy in concert (especially these days) and often let poor vocal performances go on the record.

 

I feel the opposite. I have consistently been bowled over by the absolute dazzling brilliance of Love & Theft since the day it was released. It is my favourite Dylan album post-89 and possibly since Blood On The Tracks, with only Oh Mercy to compete with it for the latter stake. I've never connected to Tempest at all. It's one of my least listened to Dylan albums. Time Out Of Mind through Modern Times was a great "renaissance period" but I feel he's slipped down a long way in the past decade.

 

I fall somewhere between the two of you. I still love Love & Theft and loved Tempest when it first came out (except for those last two cuts). I like Tempest a bit less these day, mainly because I think a few of the songs just go on a bit too long, and I absolutely abhor "Roll on John" and the title track. YMMV

That said, I still maintain Shadows in the Night is the best album he's done since Love & Theft.

Btw, I always considered Street-Legal to be his Elvis record (he looks like he's trying to dress like him on the back cover, and even has his bass player on there).

 

And I've always thought that renaissance, while good, was largely overrated.

Time Out of Mind to me was a good, not great album; Love and Theft a very good but not great album; Modern Times a not terribly good album with a couple of decent songs on it and no real canonical songs on it; Together Through Life a mostly weak album.

I think it was so nice having a good Dylan back that people overeacted to it.

But Tempest is not only a very good maybe even great album, but listening to it now a couple of years later it seems even deeper and broader than it did in 2012. I liked Tempest when it first came out but I've mostly come to love it...and I've found like a great novel it opens up in new ways when you go away from it and come back to it.

Some of the stuff from Love and Theft I still adore, and I may have been one of the few Dylan fans who immediately thought of Eric Lott's leftist cultural analysis of blackface minstrelsy from which it seems Dylan may have borrowed the title, especially given the density of borrowings not just from folk sources but also from the music of the rural recording boom that are so much on the surface of the record. But as the years have gone by, while the great stuff like "Mississippi" and "Sugar Baby" has retained it's charm for me, much of the rest of the album has lost a bit of its appeal.

 

I'm still enjoying SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT immensely. It is a great one. Gotta check out the vinyl next.

 

Tempest is dense and epic and I fully agree it is like re opening a rich novel when dipping back into it. SITN has a purity which is wonderful. They represent a highly impressive one two of consecutive quality releases.

 

Tempest is like walking into a bar and being invited to join an absinthe drinking game by a group of strangers, only to discover they are Edgar Allan Poe, John Lennon, Jack The Ripper, Caligula, Herman Melville, Jesus and the Buddha. And they're being filmed by John Houston for National Geographic.

 

While Bob Wills, Muddy Waters and the Carter Family are playing on the jukebox.

 

Finally cracked open my vinyl LP of SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT. Really like the sound of the vinyl. I think. (I often wonder just what exactly triggers my preference for a vinyl version over a digital one and if any of it is sentimental wallowing.)
The LP is bowl-warped but the needle rides no waves on either side. My pressing arrived clean enough and I gave the slab a Spin Clean party ... but the record needed a subsequent Spin Clean after the last song on the first side began skipping.

Ain't no skipping allowed in my house.

The sibilance-level is acceptable to my ears -- hey, there's no distortion anywhere on this record. BTW, I don't have a high-end rig here but I know how I like things to sound and how to get a sound I like with these components. The vinyl record sounds good turned up a touch. Doing so really opens up the soundstage more than anything. What a great record this is, BTW. The fact the full CD is included is pretty cool even if it kinda says a lot about the format's perceived value at the moment.
Vinyl is a good format for what I think will ultimately be seen as a great record. If the old adage went, 'digital = cold; analog = warm,' then SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT is most definitely an "analog" album in spirit and not just cause of the songs' respective vintages. I don't know whether SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT was recorded via analog or digital technology but I will say it's marvelously recorded and mixed. So open, so clear and relaxed, the recordings capture fantastic performances. This is Bob's first-ever album upon which he doesn't play anything but his voice, which sounds perfect to each song. He positively croons throughout.
Okay, okay, enough already. Good album.

 

Not really - the vinyl cost me pretty much double the CD cost, and the CD doesn't come with any artwork etc, so including it is hardly Robin Hood territory.