It seems redundant to apply more adjectives to Bob Dylan's singing voice-- easily the most infamous rasp in American music, a cultivated tangle of disdain and nicotine and bad love-- but it remains the defining characteristic of his work, as essential to his legacy as vowels or the acoustic guitar. Dylan's long-lauded backing band, which has helped define much of his later work, may crank out a first-rate iteration of honky-tonk bar-rock, but it's primarily a canvas. His voice is so unique (even when it's approximating other voices) that I crave it the same way I might crave, say, an apple: It's a thing unlike any other thing, a whole food, a singular expression.
Still, on Tempest, his latest album, Bob Dylan mostly sounds insane. That volatility can yield tremendous rewards-- on the ferocious "Pay in Blood", it clarifies his nihilism, his cruelty-- but it can also be distractingly unruly, inching toward self-mockery, all wild undulation and hairball-retch. Which would be okay-- embraced, even!-- if the rest of Tempest didn't feel so rote. Here it is, again: the gargle, the zinger, the rollicking blues riff. The formula that made Time Out of Mind through Modern Times such a thrilling stretch feels exhausted now, and Dylan relies on his own gruffness as a substitute for real intent; he knows he doesn't have to work very hard to sound present, and so he doesn't, and so he isn't.
Lyrically, he's sharpest when eulogizing mangled relationships ("One time, for one brief day, I was the man for you," he seethes on "Long and Wasted Years"), and the best cuts here are the ones that directly address lingering heartache. On "Soon After Midnight", he speaks to an absent lover: "It's now or never, more than ever/ When I met you, I didn't think you would do/ It's soon after midnight, and I don't want nobody but you," he sings. It's a classic Blood on the Tracks-era barb, vitriol mixed with real longing-- rage and love, rage at love. Likewise, on "Narrow Way", he admits inferiority ("I can't work up to you/ You'll surely have to work down to me someday"), then accuses his girl of certain cruelties ("You broke my heart/ I was your friend 'til now... You got too many lovers").
At just under 14 minutes, the album's epic title track is also its longest (worth noting: It outruns "Desolation Row" (11:20) and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (11:22), but not "Highlands" (16:31), Time Out of Mind's sprawling closer), a sober and meandering meditation on the sinking of the Titanic. In the pantheon of grand, gory tragedies, the dismembering of the Titanic via iceberg is a catastrophic entry, sure, but its legend still trumps its carnage, making it worth wondering why Bob Dylan, in particular, would suddenly revisit it a solid century on. In her essay "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38", Joan Didion, writing both of the Titanic and of Howard Hughes, hints at the inescapable glee of schadenfreude, how we (quietly) relish the beautiful becoming the damned: "Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted," she writes. "How the mighty are fallen."
"Tempest" is based at least in part on "The Titanic" (or "When That Great Ship Went Down"), an old folk song that likely originated around 1915 in Hackleburg, Alabama, and has since been recorded by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and others. In his notes for the 1997 reissue of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Folkways archivist Jeff Place notes that some African-Americans viewed the Titanic's dissolution as a kind of "divine retribution," given that blacks were resolutely banished from the ship (indeed, the version recorded by William and Versey Smith for the Anthology is conspicuously spirited). Here, though, Dylan is earnest, nearly deferential. It's not schadenfreude, or retribution, or even a social commentary; it's a long, sad, straightforward narrative, complete with a "little crippled child," self-sacrifice, hearts at peace, and a final glug of brandy as the ship slips under. "There is no understanding... the judgment of God's hand," Dylan announces, and I suppose that's as reasonable an explanation as any, although it's also a disappointingly pedestrian conclusion from an artist as acerbic (and populist) as Bob Dylan.
And so it's revealed that death-- mass death, helpless death, inevitable death-- is the real story here, and Tempest, for all its detours toward sadness and alienation, is very much a record about The End. Whom we loved, who failed us, and what it all means in the face of our own inevitable demise. Dylan's long been enamored with Appalachian murder ballads-- those gruesome, Celtic-born parables designed to dissuade potential sinners from indulging their darker whims-- but he's finally learned, at 71, that death doesn't necessarily come with a lesson, sometimes it just comes. Tempest's moving closing track, "Roll on John", a remembrance of John Lennon, suffers from a few flaccid clichés ("You burned so bright!"), but at least Dylan finally sounds engaged, his garbled vocals heavy with sorrow and helplessness. In that sense, it's a fitting coda for an album bogged down with resignation.
