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The
Major Lift
By
Erik Hage
From
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” to John Wesley Harding to
The Basement Tapes to the more recent Modern Times,
Bob Dylan has given us enough American mythopoetic
fodder to fill sepia-toned volumes and keep cultural critics
searching for aphorisms for the rest of their natural lives.
Now, in his late 60s, he seems to have found yet more purchase
in the great border towns of his kaleidoscopic imagination.
2006’s Modern Times was a set of polished Americana
noir, troubled and spooky and driven by Dylan’s flattened,
devastated rasp. (It’s the prophetic voice of an otherworldly
crone, warning you away from deep, dark trouble.)
Together
Through Life is more murky, more loose, careening at times
like an old train: on the blues-boogeying “It’s All Good,”
for example, wherein Dylan takes that canned phrase, spinning
it out to show that, from the bedrooms to the halls of politics,
it’s in fact not good at all, while the band slide
along in a trancelike gutbucket drive that calls to mind John
Lee Hooker. The album also drums up incantations of the Chess
Records of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Howlin’ Wolf, cursing
it with a touch of Dylan’s new- millennium nightshade, particularly
on “My Wife’s Hometown,” which manages to tease you with Dixon’s
“I Just Wanna Make Love to You” while fulfilling its own black
agenda. (“I just wanna say that hell’s my wife’s hometown.”)
David Hildago (Los Lobos) lathers accordion everywhere on
this album, and guitarist Mike Campbell (Tom Petty) plays
it dirty and subtle.
 Nevertheless,
it’s wrong to compare Dylan to the blues masters or summon
up obvious terms like “bayou” or “Tex-Mex.” The Americana
that Dylan is plying away at lately is from an America of
his own devising, not only the archaic, fantastical one lodged
in his imagination but the literal America that he helped
create. That was Dylan singing “Only a Pawn in Their Game”
at 1963 civil-rights rally. That was Dylan who changed the
face of popular music, leading the Beatles, Van Morrison and
others into lyrical impressionism. That was Dylan rubbing
shoulders with Johnny Cash. Together Through Life is
the next, next, next chapter in Dylan’s America, and we’re
all stakeholders. This is Dylan’s America and, as he tells
it, “beyond here lies nothing but the mountains of the night.”
Here lies his best work of the new millennium, spun out in
a ramshackle session that is rich as hell.
To turn away from American mythology to Brit pop, Peter
Doherty, known on these shores mostly for besotted behavior,
has managed to be one of the more interesting English songwriters
in recent years, first with the Libertines and later with
Babyshambles. For Grace/Wastelands, he turns to burnished
tones—sometimes acoustic, sometimes clip-clopping, controlled
little Ray Davies rockers. The whole thing reeks of a good
kind of Englishness, with producer Stephen Street (The Smiths,
Blur) bringing in way-underrated guitarist Graham Coxon (Blur)
as ballast. The result is an album of many shades, most of
them very appealing: the frosty acoustic tones of “Lady Don’t
Fall Backwards,” the wannabe Blur anthem “Last of the English
Roses,” the dramatic euro-vamping of “A Little Death Around
the Eyes,” the tea-in-the-parlor overtones of “Salome.” Coxon’s
steady hand and bristling accents are the perfect foil to
Doherty’s beautiful, calculated carelessness, and the seductive
textures and strong songwriting on this album keep me coming
back to it.
 The
Disciplines shouldn’t be talked about in terms of American
or British mythology, for their world is simply the world
of melodically potent, guitar-charged rock. I like the Disciplines
in the same way that I like the Gentlemen. This is palette-cleansing,
hard-charging rock strafed with guitar artillery, and the
band itself are an interesting amalgam, featuring Ken Stringfellow,
who co-leads Northwestern power-poppers the Posies, but who
has also had a lucrative career as a Guy Friday of sorts,
helping Alex Chilton resurrect Big Star and becoming a valuable
utility player on R.E.M. tours. Stringfellow, who now makes
his home in France, is backed up here by a band of Norwegians
from the Scandinavian synth-rock band Briskeby. On Smoking
Kills, though, they crank up the guitars, and with the
exception of the lighter-raising anthem “Oslo,” this is a
tough, tough rock album. The songs that really hit the sweet
spot here are “Yours for the Taking,” with Stringfellow’s
harpie howl delightfully underpinned by slashing and chopping
guitar; the Kurt Weill-meets-glam rock thunder of “Best Mistake”;
and the wailing peaks and sparkling valleys of “There’s a
Law.” If you like loud guitars and have ears, I strongly recommend
this.
I hate to end on a clinker, but Michelle Shocked long
ago learned what the zen masters taught: Most problems are
problems of the ego. Here was a potentially vital career that
was severely undercut by the artist’s own sense of grandiloquence
long ago. After the surprising success of the lo-fi Texas
Campfire Tapes, Shocked released the fine, rootsy album
that rightfully brought her to larger acclaim, Short Sharp
Shocked, in 1988. Having a trilogy in mind (best leave
those to Tolkien and Cormac McCarthy), she followed up with
the unconvincing Texas swing set Captain Swing, and
then had to be talked down off the ledge when she wanted to
appear in blackface on the cover of her next album, Arkansas
Traveler, which nonetheless featured guests such as Levon
Helm, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Uncle Tupelo (among
others). In the wake of that album, she sued her record
company, stating that her 13th Amendment right (um, prohibiting
slavery) had been violated. She has stuck around though,
releasing several, low-profile albums, and her new one, Soul
of My Soul, seems like an act of relative humility. But
you’ll encounter polished, toothless roots-rock with less-than-inspiring
songwriting. There are lots of obvious political and love
platitudes, but this is an album that ultimately seems full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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