Empire Burlesque
by Bob Dylan

From llibnanoon 06/01/2020 18:48 | #252673

If not for "Dark Eyes" this album would have sunk to the bottom!

With the overcooked arrangements, this album reminds me of Street Legal, with its female choruses and horn arrangements. But Street Legal sounds over-the-top, people don't like it (I do, but most don't) in part because it's so insistent and brashly passionate, it's in your face. This one isn't, it's tightly controlled and constrained, it doesn't storm around like a good Dylan album should. It tries to be polite, and good Dylan isn't that. Whereas Street Legal has songs that feel like they are written and sung out of need, this one feels like he was trying to come up with an album. Ron Wood's comments about the production process--you can read them at the Wikipedia entry on this album--are telling.

Also, the Wikipedia entry has an interesting note on the lyric borrowings; apparently some of the lyrics are lifted from Star Trek scripts and other unexpected sources, which I didn't know. Shades of the more recent album where he lifted from a translation of an obscure Japanese gangster novel, and another time when he took lines from Henry Timrod, a poet of the Confederacy. Dylan sometimes borrows for lyrics the same way TS Eliot did for The Waste Land--obscure sources, doesn't tell anybody he's doing it, it might only be discovered much later. He's a funny guy; this album isn't so funny though.

Dylan's shot at the title. He obviously took note of the success that Bruce Springsteen recently had with Born in the USA, and thought, I want some of that. Apparently, no one told Dylan that he was a middle-aged man with a wrecked voice and, oh, not very good songs. There was no way Bob was ever going to be a pop star. Actually, some of the songs aren't that bad at all. The problem with the album, is that it has all the hallmarks of the eighties, I mean, look at that album cover. Reedy synthesizers trying to replicate real instruments. Check out that awful harmonica sound on the opening track. Even so, that first track, tight connection to my heart, is actually quite good, but a lot of the songs are lost in that eighties production. They may have sounded better if only he had recorded them with just guitar, bass and drums. The last song, dark eyes, although an average acoustic track, almost sounds like genius after what's gone before. Born in the USA it is not. Extremely disappointing results that could have been better if he had recorded it correctly.

From eclab 03/16/2014 03:46 | #106431

The vocals can be pretty whiny at times, but overall it's a decent album. (7.8)