Författare Ämne: Tempest  (läst 296030 gånger)

Utloggad Humlan

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 8072
    • Visa profil
SV: Tempest
« Svar #345 skrivet: 22 augusti, 2012, 09:17:22 »
Uncuts Allan Jones har tydligen skrivit en lång hyllning till recension av Tempest. Den ska nu ha publicerats åtminstone ii surfplatteupplagan av tidningen, men ligger inte för allmän beskådan på nätet. 10/10

http://expectingrain.com/discussions/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=71428&start=150

gerardv

Bob Dylan's fantastic new album opens with a train song.

Given the wrath to come and the often elemental ire that accompanies it,
not to mention all the bloodshed, madness, death,
chaos and assorted disasters that will shortly be forthcoming,
you may be surprised that what's clattering alomg the tracks
here isn't the ominous engine of a slow train coming,
a locomotive of doom and destruction, souls wailing in
a caboose crowded with the forlorn damned and other people like them.

'Dunquesne Whistle' instead, and at odds it will shortly
transpire with much we go on to encounter, joyfully evokes
the jubilee train of gospel legend, bound for glory;
a salvation express full of hopeful halelujahs, its destination
somewhere better than here, this sickly place and its trampled sadness,
unceasing strife and grief everywhere you look.

In ways some distance removed from the things waiting on the
rest of the album, Duquesne Whistle is passably carefree, possibly
even best described as rambunctious.
It begins fabulously, with a jazzy instrumental preface, reminiscent
of 'Nashville Skyline Rag', guitarists Charlie Sexton and
Stu Kimball briskly exchanging Charlie Christian licks.

It's like turning on the radio and tuning into the past, nostalgically
evocative of a more sunlit innocent time.

There is too the impression that we have joined the album, somehow,
after it's already started and eerily like this music has been playing
on a disk that never stops spinning.

Then the whole group blows in, the magnificent road band that's
backed Dylan, most of them anyway, on everything he's recorded
since 'Love and Theft', and so includes Modern Times,
Together Through Life and Christmas in the Heart.

They are ablaze here and on fire throughout, and at their
jitterbugging point of entry.

'Duquesne Whistle' takes on an upstoppable momentum that may
remind you of, say, 'Highway 61 Revisited' or 'Tombstone Blues'
(I was also freetingly reminded of Cat Power's swinging version
of 'Stuck inside of Mobile' from the I'm not Here soundtrack.

Even as the song is apparently celebrating what's good in the world,
something more awry is stirring, clouds gathering.

'Can't you hear that Duquesne Whistle blowin? Blowin like the sky's
gonna blow apart' Dylan sings in intimation of shadows about to fall on paradise.

In other words, Tempest is not dark yet, but it will be soon enough.

When Dylan convened with his band at Jackson Browne's Groove Masters
Studio on Santa Monica, he's said it was his intention to
make a 'religious ' album, though he wasn't specific about quite what
he meant by this and whether there was any connection between the
record he had in mind and his so-called Born Again albums, that trio
of disks including Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love that 30 years ago
shocked and confounded his audience, when they were also alarmed by the vengeful
sermonising that puctuated his concerts of the time.

There are perhaps inklings, though, of the album Dylan originally
envisioned on, for instance, the devotionally inclined
'Long and Wasted Years', and the gospel influenced 'Pay in Blood', which follows.

The testing of belief in extreme circumstances is a recurring theme.

Long and Wasted Years finds Dylan almost talking his way through the song,
in the manner of 'Three Angels' from New Morning, over a slightly
churchy organ and a lovely bluesy guitar refrain.

'I think that when my back was turned, the whole world behind me burned',
Dylan recites at one point, the charred landscape that so much of Tempest
occupies coming into full focus, a forlorn sort of place, populated by the
displaced and the lost, to who Dylan gives poignant voice.

'I ain't seen my family in 20 years', he reflects wearily in one of the verses
'They may be dead by now. I lost track of them after they lost their land'.

The bereft hopelessness that is evident in many instances on the album is
particularly well articulated here, especially in the song's chastening
final image: 'We cried on a cold and frosty morn.

'Dylan mourns, and there's no other word for it.

'We cried because our souls were torn/So much for tears,
so much for these long and wasted years'.

Pay in Blood opens with guitars, piano and a little Tex-Mex swagger
over a vaguely menacing chord sequence reminiscent of those
great declamatory Warren Zevon songs that Dylan so admires,
like 'Lawyers, Guns and Money', 'Boom Boom Mancini'
(which Dylan covered in concert several times as a tribute when Zevon died in 2003).

There's a hint, too, in the arrangement, of the song's gospel roots,
and something of the Stones in Sexton's admirable guitar riff.

It's a song in part about the futile notion of suffering being in any way ennobling.

'How I made it back home, nobody knows/Or how I survived so many blows/I've been
through hell, what good did it do?' Dylan asks, a bitter question, asked perhaps of God,
since he then adds 'You bastard, I'm supposed to respect you? I'll give you justice'.

The singer's anger is anger palpably rising, and he is prone to reject communal
solace for a life apart, lonely and slightly terrified.

'This is how I spend my days/I take my fear and sleep alone' Dylan sings,
following it with the chilling pay-off line, several times repeated 'I pay in blood, but not my own'.
 
'Soon After Midnight', meanwhile, sounds at first like a touching,
funny country love song, gently crooned, with the languid melody lope of Mississippi.

It gives way suddenly, however, to a similar distress-'My heart is fearful/It's
never cheerful/I've been down on the killing floor'-and an incrementally vengeful mood
that surfaces several times elsewhere, with even greater malevolence.

'Narrow Way', for instance, is seven minutes of wrath, driven by the kind of
scalding guitar circulations that propelled 'Dirt Road Blues' on
Time Out Of Mind and Modern Times' 'Rollin and Tumblin', both of which also were
indebted to Muddy Waters.

'This is a hard country to stay alive in' Dylan sings, in condemnation of
the people who have made it thus, adding in warning 'I'm armed to the hilt'.

'Early Roman Kings' is equally livid, an accusatory tirade, again directed at
the same people Dylan has pretty much railed against since he first put
plectrum to guitar string and started having his say about things.

The 'kings' of the song are vividly seen in 'their sharkskin suits, bow-ties and buttons
and high top boots' as shyster bankers, corrupt money men who have bankrupted nations,
impoverished millions.

As Dylan put it, 'The meddlers and peddlers, they buy and they sell/They destroyed your city,
they'll destroy you as well'.

What Dylan feels about them is akin to the savage hate expressed on 'Masters of War',
say 'I could strip you of life, strip you of breath/Ship you down to the house of death'
he sings with hostile contempt, nothing particularly equivocal about his point this point
of view, which is in a word merciless.

'Early Roman Kings' is the closest thing here to the kind of roadhouse blues
that has been a signature of a lot of recent Dylan, especially Together Through Life.

David Hidalgo from Los Lobos adds typically gutsy accordion to the band's robust vamping
and the track's lurching gait is an absolute gas, it's vicious sentiment notwithstanding.

The blues continues to be a vital part of Dylan's music, but Tempest on key songs also
marks a return to a folk tradition that has latterly not been as much in evidence.

'Scarlet Town' is notably set to a melody that sounds like it's been passed down the ages
and has a courtly mien reminiscent of the Gillian Welch song from last year's
The Harrow & The Harvest with which it shares a title.

Fiddle and banjo take the lead here, creating a mysterious swirling atmosphere.

There are flashes of bawdy humour, too, but the pervasive mood, here as elsewhere,
is ultimately of turmoil and unrest.

Towards the end of its 7 minute running time, the track is further interrupted
by a wraith-like guitar solo that rises out of the mix like something emerging
from a fog and adds a particular creepiness to things.

'Tim Angel' sounds similarly as if it could have been lifted wholesale from an
anthology of traditional folk songs, where hundreds of such tales must lurk.

It's a revenge ballad, nine minutes long, with no chorus, banjo and fiddle again to the fore.

The setting is vague. References in one of the latter verses to a helmet and
a cross=handed sword suggest a chivalric age.

But soon after that, there's a gunfight, the kind of point-black shootout set-piece you
used to find in Walter Hill movies, which suggests Dylan at one point may have had
a Western setting in mind, perhaps inspired by a recent tour bus viewing of something like
'Duel in the Sun', a torrid oafer starring Dylan favourite Gregory Peck.

What happens, anyway, is that someone called 'The Boss', which is not a name you probably
come across too often in the Child Ballads, one day comes home from wherever to find his
wife has gone missing.

Whither the Missus? Has she simply left him, or been adbucted? Boss upon investigation
is tipped off by a faithful retainer that the errant spouse has in fact made off with
one Henry Lee, leader of an unindentified clan.

Boss ceders his men to horse and off they gallop in hot pursuit, his men deserting him
along the way.

Dogged Boss continues alone.

After presumably much travail, Boss tracks down Henry Lee and his wife, bursts in on
their amorous coupling and after declaring his love for his wife starts blasting away.

Henry Lee's the better shot and soon Boss is dying in his own blood.

The missus takes this surprisingly badly and stabs Henry Lee before plunging a dagger
into her own heart.

The final image of the three of them tossed into a single grave 'forever to sleep'
is chillingly unforgettable.

And so to the title track: 45 verses over 14 minutes about the sinking of the Titanic,
inspired by Dylan's musing on the Carter Family's 'The Titanic', but at times as much
in debt to James Cameron's blockbuster movie (whose leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio,
is name-checked twice).

The piece starts with what sounds like a string quartet, after which brief overture
the song settles into a long unwinding waltz, progressing with stately resolution,
verse following verse, like a latter-day 'Desolation Row'.

The song vividly describes the panic and confusion as the great ship flounders,
a metaphor for the folly of over-reaching ambition; mankind again brought low
by God's intervention.

The scale of the disaster is enormous, contains 'every kind of sorrow'.

Dylan dramatically capturing the dark panic of the moment-the blown hatches,
the water pouring everywhere, the ship's smokestack crashing down, hunbler passengers
trapped below decks-and as in the film, certain characters are given their own scenes,
each verse then a gripping vignette.

There's for instance someone called Wellington, holed up in his cabin. 'Glass and shattered
crystal lay shattered round about/He strapped on both his pistols/how long could he hold out?'
And here's Jim Backer: 'He saw the starlight shining/Streaming from the east/Death was on
the rampage/but his heart was now at peace.'

'Davy the brothel-keeper' meanwhile 'came out, dismissed his girls/Saw the water getting
deeper/saw the changing of his world.

' The ship's captain at the moment of its sinking catches his reflection in the glass
of a compass and 'in the dark illumination, he remembered bygone years/He read the book
of Revelation/filled his cage with tears'.

After such calamity, the sheer tenderness of the closing 'Roll On, John' is as much
of a shock as a mere surprise.

A belated tribute to John Lennon, the song is as direct and heartfelt as anything Dylan's
written probably since 'Sara', whose occasional gaucheness it recalls, as Dylan roams
over Lennon's career 'from the Liverpool docks to the red-light Hamburg streets',
quoting from Lennon and Beatles songs along the way, including 'A Day In The Life',
'The Ballad Of John and Yoko' and 'Come Together'.

The affection expressed for Lennon in the song is tangible, makes it glow like a force-field,
and by the end is totally disarming.

'Your bones are weary, you're about to breathe your last' Dylan sings to his dead friend
'Lord you know how hard that bit can be' before moving on to a spine tingling elegaic chorus:
'Shine a light, Move it on, You burned so bright/Roll on, John'.

We must address, I suppose, in closing, the similarity of this album's title to Shakespeare's
The Tempest, widely regarded as his last play, and the idea that follows is that this record is
likewise some farewell, a summation of sorts, a final rallying of waning creative energies,
perhaps the closing act in Dylan's storied career.

The idea of Bob as a kind of riverboat prospero is hugely appealing, and he remains,
supremely, a story-telling sorcerer, but Dylan has already dismissed the comparison as
simply wrong-headed and therefore pointless.

And for all its evident pre-occupation with death and the end of things, Tempest is in many
respects the most far-reaching, provocative and transfixing album of Dylan's later career.

Nothing about it suggests a sawnsong, adios or fond adieu.

'I ain't dead yet, my bell still rings' he sings on 'Early Roman Kings',
and how loud and bright and strong that clariod toll yet sounds.
±→H4n→~ https://www.instagram.com/joakim.humleback/

"But power and greed and corruptible seed Seem to be all that there is"

"Since the legalization, Monsanto has charged Brazilian farmers 2% of their sales of Roundup Ready soya beans, which now account for an estimated 85% of the nations soyabean"

Utloggad mb650918

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 1819
    • Visa profil
    • E-post
SV: Tempest
« Svar #346 skrivet: 22 augusti, 2012, 09:18:22 »
In Scarlet Town.....

Dysterheten i melodin, texten och framförallt i sättet han sjunger.

Mer behöver jag inte säga.

20 dagar.........

20 more days, all we gotta do is survive ...


Min fru kopplade direkt till "Man In The Long Black Coat". Jag med till viss del, men också "Cross The Green Mountain".
Micke B.

Utloggad Humlan

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 8072
    • Visa profil
SV: Tempest
« Svar #347 skrivet: 22 augusti, 2012, 09:45:11 »
In Scarlet Town.....

Dysterheten i melodin, texten och framförallt i sättet han sjunger.

Mer behöver jag inte säga.

20 dagar.........

20 more days, all we gotta do is survive ...


Min fru kopplade direkt till "Man In The Long Black Coat". Jag med till viss del, men också "Cross The Green Mountain".

Min Son lyssnade igenkännande och säger helt lugnt och säkert att den där låten känner jag igen den har du spelat tidigare :-)
±→H4n→~ https://www.instagram.com/joakim.humleback/

"But power and greed and corruptible seed Seem to be all that there is"

"Since the legalization, Monsanto has charged Brazilian farmers 2% of their sales of Roundup Ready soya beans, which now account for an estimated 85% of the nations soyabean"

Utloggad Hoho

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 849
    • Visa profil
SV: Tempest
« Svar #348 skrivet: 23 augusti, 2012, 08:41:08 »
Min Son lyssnade igenkännande och säger helt lugnt och säkert att den där låten känner jag igen den har du spelat tidigare :-)

 :d1: :d3: :d4: :ph34r: -_- hihi
The more I die, the more I live.

Utloggad Humlan

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 8072
    • Visa profil
SV: Tempest
« Svar #349 skrivet: 23 augusti, 2012, 09:47:47 »
Min Son lyssnade igenkännande och säger helt lugnt och säkert att den där låten känner jag igen den har du spelat tidigare :-)

 :d1: :d3: :d4: :ph34r: -_- hihi

:-) Bobby !!  Nag champa ! Lirac ! Tempest ! Cohiba !
±→H4n→~ https://www.instagram.com/joakim.humleback/

"But power and greed and corruptible seed Seem to be all that there is"

"Since the legalization, Monsanto has charged Brazilian farmers 2% of their sales of Roundup Ready soya beans, which now account for an estimated 85% of the nations soyabean"

Utloggad Hibbitt

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 1671
    • Visa profil
    • E-post
SV: Tempest
« Svar #350 skrivet: 23 augusti, 2012, 10:38:13 »
Så var vi uppe i 350 inlägg i Tempest-diskussionen - lååångt innan skivan ens snurrat igång. Bådar gott.
...and if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme to your tambourine in time...

Utloggad mb650918

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 1819
    • Visa profil
    • E-post
SV: Tempest
« Svar #351 skrivet: 23 augusti, 2012, 13:12:03 »
In Scarlet Town.....

Dysterheten i melodin, texten och framförallt i sättet han sjunger.

Mer behöver jag inte säga.

20 dagar.........

20 more days, all we gotta do is survive ...


Min fru kopplade direkt till "Man In The Long Black Coat". Jag med till viss del, men också "Cross The Green Mountain".

Min Son lyssnade igenkännande och säger helt lugnt och säkert att den där låten känner jag igen den har du spelat tidigare :-)

 ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^
Micke B.

Utloggad Leif

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 4238
    • Visa profil
    • E-post
SV: Tempest
« Svar #352 skrivet: 25 augusti, 2012, 19:31:46 »
Och här är Mojos recension (hämtad från ER´s forum)

The perfect storm
Dylan sets sail on his finest album of this century.
By David Fricke.

Bob Dylan
*****
Tempest
COLUMBIA CD/LP

“They battened down the hatches/But the hatches wouldn't hold,” Bob Dylan sings in the title song of his 35th studio album. Tempest is an epic-ballad account of the sinking of the Titanic, rendered by Dylan in a plaintive growl and ballroom-waltz time and mined with blatant fiction. There was no tempest that night; the Titanic hit the iceberg in clear calm weather. We have no evidence to suggest, as Dylan does, that the doomed passengers turned on each other in homicidal panic. And Leonardo DiCaprio, who appears two minutes into the song's quarter-hour, was only on the Titanic in James Cameron's movie.

But the truth of that lyric blows hard, cruel and constant across Tempest, a 10-song storm of trial, envy, obsession, violent retribution and fatal human error, set on scorched terrain and unforgiving seas. Raw memories and bad dreams are daily bread. Judgment comes to all; and there is no appeal. By the time Dylan set sails in Tempest, the penultimate track, he has promised just deserts in Narrow Road (“If I can't work up to you/You'll surely have to work down to me someday”) and Pay in Blood (“I pay in blood/But not my own”). In Tin Angel, a love triangle ends in two murders and a suicide, like the folk-noir carol Matty Groves with dialogue by James M. Cain.

Soon After Midnight starts like something the high-school Dylan would have played with his Hibbing combo the Golden Chords – a ladies' choice laced with the sweet cries of Donnie Herron's pedal-steel guitar. But then Dylan borrows from Howlin' Wolf (“I've been down on the killin' floors”) and issues his own pregnant warning: “I'm in no great hurry/I'm not afraid of the fury/I've faced stronger walls than yours.” If this is love, it will come dearly.

Tempest is Dylan's fourth album in the late-blooming streak that began with 2001's “Love and Theft” (not counting the spiked eggnog of 2009's Christmas In The Heart). He now makes records the same way he tours – like he's issuing bulletins from one never-ending session of jump blues, clattering boogie and dead-man-walking shuffles, cut in steady circular arrangements with his railroad-groove road band. After four decades of first-take impatience and hit-and-miss confederates, the studio Dylan has turned into AC/DC comfortable and certain in his formula.

Like his last three albums, Tempest is also a feast of one-liners, Dylan working his turf like a stand-up comic in hanging-judge robes.
“I ain't dead yet/My bell still rings,” he boasts in Early Roman Kings, a hard-charging spin on Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy, while that third wheel in the Tin Angel triangle is, “a gutless ape with a worthless mind.” It is songwriting as whirlwind, Dylan stitching his rogues and aphorisms together the same way he edited his films Eat The Document and Renaldo And Clara. “Anything goes,” Dylan recently admitted, describing the album to Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone. “You just gotta believe it will make sense.”

And it does, for the most elementary and compelling reason: performance. Tempest is Dylan's best musical album of this century, a vibrant maximising of strict rules and the savaged leather state of that voice. He mostly sticks to his small range, in whispered, menacing close-up, and his band – with guitarist Charlie Sexton back in the line-up – kicks and swings with the same articulate focus. Duquesne Whistle opens with a Jimmie Rodgers flair and rolls like a country-Nuggets express; Pay In Blood comes with a gait and kick that evokes the mid-'70s Rolling Stones (specifically Hand Of Fate).

Tempest seems to end like another album altogether. Compared to his thoroughbred finishes on 2006's Modern Times (Ain't Talkin') and '09's Together Through Life (It's All Good), Dylan's Lennon homage Roll On John is an odd way out, the heart-string mandolin, soft funeral organ and a mash-up of fuzzy history, historical references, Beatle lyrics and William Blake. But there is a strong wind of missing too, the frank mourning of a competitive twin. At 71, Dylan is a most remarkable survivor: still standing, working and confounding. But for the last few minutes here, he sound his age: weathered, weary and alone in his tempest.
The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from bein seen.
But that's just because he doesn't want to turn into some machine.

Utloggad lundell

  • Landlord
  • *****
  • Antal inlägg: 494
    • Visa profil
    • E-post
SV: Tempest
« Svar #353 skrivet: 26 augusti, 2012, 08:48:07 »
"Tempest is Dylan's best musical album of this century".

Jag börjar nästan våga tro på detta nu -_-

Utloggad mb650918

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 1819
    • Visa profil
    • E-post
SV: Tempest
« Svar #354 skrivet: 26 augusti, 2012, 19:21:11 »
"Tempest is Dylan's best musical album of this century".

Jag börjar nästan våga tro på detta nu -_-

Vaddå? Det har gått 2 år...
Micke B.

Utloggad Elston

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 6925
    • MSN Messenger - elstongunnn@hotmail.com
    • Visa profil
    • Myspace
    • E-post
SV: Tempest
« Svar #355 skrivet: 26 augusti, 2012, 19:40:20 »
"Tempest is Dylan's best musical album of this century".

Jag börjar nästan våga tro på detta nu -_-

Vaddå? Det har gått 2 år...

Tolv år har det gått på detta sekel/århundrade. Du kanske tänker på decade, alltså årtionde?
Beyond the horizon, the sky is so blue
I've got more than a lifetime to live loving you

Utloggad M:o Nightmare

  • Precious Angel
  • *******
  • Antal inlägg: 2156
  • I woke in the mornin' wand'rin'...
    • Visa profil
SV: Tempest
« Svar #356 skrivet: 27 augusti, 2012, 07:33:31 »
Oj Oj Oj här har det verkligen spekulerats medans jag semestrat....jag börjar tro att denna 'Tempest' blir minst i klass med 'Desire'...

"Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun
Dust on my face and my cape
Me and Magdalena on the run
I think this time we shall escape"

 -_-

Gypsy gal, you got me swallowed
I have fallen far beneath
Your pearly eyes, so fast an' slashing
An' your flashing diamond teeth

Utloggad Offe

  • Landlord
  • *****
  • Antal inlägg: 347
    • MSN Messenger - rtot@hotmail.com
    • Visa profil
SV: Tempest
« Svar #357 skrivet: 27 augusti, 2012, 12:36:43 »
Ifrån Expecting rain:

The first official single from Tempest, "Duquesne Whistle", hits the airwaves today, 8/27 and amazon.com tomorrow 8/28.

When you're with me, I'm a thousand times happier than I could ever say.

Garcia678

  • Gäst
SV: Tempest
« Svar #358 skrivet: 27 augusti, 2012, 13:03:11 »
Ifrån Expecting rain:

The first official single from Tempest, "Duquesne Whistle", hits the airwaves today, 8/27 and amazon.com tomorrow 8/28.



Jösses! :d5:

Garcia678

  • Gäst
SV: Tempest
« Svar #359 skrivet: 27 augusti, 2012, 13:19:28 »
Nån koppling till lokomotiv tro?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_(PRR)