Bob Dylan
Time Out Of Mind
1997

genre: folk-rock, blues-rock
1. Love Sick - 5:21
2. Dirt Road Blues - 3:36
3. Standing In the Doorway - 7:43
4. Million Miles - 5:52
5. Tryin' To Get To Heaven - 5:21
6. 'til I Fell In Love With You - 5:17
7. Not Dark Yet - 6:29
8. Cold Irons Bound - 7:15
9. Make You Feel My Love - 3:32
10. Can't Wait - 5:47
11. Highlands - 16:31

Passé as may be to think so, I'm not ashamed in the slightest to call Bob Dylan here one of my absolute favourite artists of all time. Two or three years ago, I'd sooner start eating peanut butter on toast again than get caught saying that. Back in the day I used to think this man was just about the most overrated artist in rock music history, rambling as he often did in the few songs of his I knew by name with a voice that sounded like a vacuum cleaner. In other words, it's quite strange that I like Dylan enough to call him one of my favourites, especially considering there are still areas of his discography that bore me a little. It was only early on this year as well that I started to properly explore it too and deciding that all that irritates me about him is how hard it is to find any of his material on youtube without stumbling through dozens of god-awful, misleadingly-titled covers by random hacks on the internet (even the videos I found below need to be double-clicked if you wanna watch them).

What happened? It's a not-too-interesting story I'm sure I've bored you all with somewhere here before, but among other things it was hearing this album - Dylan's big comeback of the '90s and first album of original material for some 7 years - that brought me round to the dark side. It was just a while after I wrote 1976's Desire into my album list of yesteryear that I first got hold of this and, oddly enough, I hated it. I think I only got through 3 or 4 of the songs before I decided this album was more overrated than New Labour was that very same year before ditching it in favour of something or other. Dylan's voice sounded really scratchy, aged and totally incapable of reeling me in, as did what first seemed to me like a sparse, lazy bunch of instrumental arrangements.

Somewhere along the line though, something clicked with me, and to say that this album unravelled would be quite the understatement. I'd taken a liking to a handful of other, older Dylan albums (such as Blood On the Tracks, Nashville Skyline and Street Legal and Infidels) before I could bring myself to listen to the opening bars of Love Sick again. 10-15 seconds in, the mood and feel of the album has a light shone on it for the first time, with Bobby D's opening lines of 'I'm walking through streets that are dead - walking with you in my head', backed up only by a sharp, staccato guitar riff before the gentle rhythm and ghostly electric piano kinda fade into the mix from the distance.

While the pace of the album may vary here and there, from faster footstompers like Dirt Road Blues to slower, more contemplative and lyric-centric numbers like Tryin' To Get To Heaven, overall you can get a handle of the feel of this marvelous album just by looking at the sleeve art above - put simply, as you listen to this it's very easy to imagine Dylan and his backing band playing this album to you in that same bleak, dimly-lit studio. Listening to this album on a long night in on your own is, then, quite an experience, as this album gives off a very ethereal, grim kinda vibe. As such, Time Out Of Mind here is quite possibly my favourite night-listening album.

It was as that dark, bleakly morbid and grainy atmosphere began to unravel in front of me that songs like the drumbeat-driven Tryin' To Get To Heaven began to hit home with me that much more, as it became obvious to me that this was an effortlessly awesome side of Bob Dylan's songwriting that was previously totally alien to me. The credit for this ghostly, despairing vibe, focusing on sharp, stop-start guitar riffs, ethereal organ flourishes and simplistic rhythms rests on the shoulders of not only Dylan himself but his co-producer for the album sessions, Daniel Lanois. They cultivate a sound that's something between folk, blues, garage and even country-rock absolutely superbly here, which creates a simply gorgeous ballad sound on numbers like the simply beautiful Not Dark Yet and Make You Feel My Love, and a racous, frenetic vibe on the harder-rocking Cold Irons Bound - another of my favourite Dylan songs.

Before I go on too long (as if I haven't already), this album presented me with a side Dylan's sound that I (and a lot of other similarly-casual listeners) quite simply never would've associated with him before. There is, after all, absolutely no acoustic guitar or harmonica to be heard, as a much darker and more image-rich sound is created. As I've probably said quite a few times already, it all seemed like lo-fi (well...ish), overlong drivel to me at first, but really came off as the wonderful, beautifully atmospheric album that it is after about 3 listens.

In a sentence, this is my favourite Dylan album, and Highlands is my favourite Dylan song.

Originally Posted by James I liked that thread.

Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft
Out Here, In There
2002

genre: vocal jazz, new jazz
1. Truth - 5:26
2. Out Here, In There - 5:47
3. Survival Techniques 1+2 - 5:04
4. Survival Techniques 3 - 2:14
5. Names Numbers - 5:30
6. Hav - 3:31
7. Birds - 3:56
8. Voices - 2:39
9. Heartbeat - 4:25
10. I Do - 3:59
11. Try - 4:00

As cool and hipster-ish I'd seem by saying 'yeah, I've known these two, like, all my life', I can tell you now that that just ain't gonna happen. This'd be more because of the fact that it's only been about a month since I've even known that Bugge can be a Christian name. That's kinda how this journal's going to work over time - some of these albums (like the Dylan one above) will be old favourites, others will be ones I've only gotten hold of fairly recently. As such, I probably won't end up going on so long about this album as others, but I'll do my best Plus, there's a lot about these two that remains a mystery to me, so the whole background info portion of this particular review won't be all that juicy and/or meaty. What I know and you definitely need to know if you're cool enough to be reading this is that vocalist Sidsel Endresen and keyboardist/pianist Bugge Wesseltoft are both Norweigan, and as such hail from what I've been discovering to be a very rich and pulsating Scandinavian new-jazz scene. I imagine that there'll be more from this scene coming this thread's way in future, as it's an uber-awesome area of music that I've only just been starting to explore.

This is all very thin-end-of-the-wedge stuff then, which is all very exciting for me as far as additions to the old musical library go but, enough about me - I suppose I'd better tell you what this is all about eh. Sung in English by Endresen, this is nevertheless a completely new kind of music to the me who first signed up to MB almost 2 years ago, that me being, of course, a me whose only dabblings in jazz amounted to (if my memory's all that great) Herbie Hancock's River, John Coltrane's Blue Train and a few words in my ear about how I should really think about getting hold of Kind Of Blue. I think I actually first found out about this pair via LastFM's 'similar artists' links - I forget who I was looking up on it exactly.

Anyway, on to the album itself...one which, for me, goes to show that every now and then, if you take music a bit more seriously than others, you really can do a lot worse than have a look around outside of your comfort zone every now and then. It's a bleak, minimalist affair on the whole - a bare-bones approach to composition and studio production that shows off the spine of the album's entire sound for all to see, this being the frankly brilliant vocals from Endresen and the subtle touches of Wesseltoft behind his keyboard. The whole thing in a nutshell is there for all to see in the soft, almost whispery opener Truth - the light touches from Wesseltoft on the electric piano and Endresen's soaring, sweet vocal fitting together in the sonic picture wonderfully, as both musicians kinda play off one another to create a fairly remarkable whole.

That said 'remarkable whole' being a very evocative, cold and wintry vibe, and one that brings to mind sitting around in the middle of a misty snowstorm, endlessly sipping cups of tea to warm up next to one of those little plug-in heaters from the supermarket you can never seem to find enough of when you actually need them. So, yeah...pretty warming, relaxing stuff in other words, at least in the main. If it's a comparison you're after, I guess you could say Endresen's vocal style puts her somewhere between a jazzier Joni Mitchell and a (much) more low-key Lisa Gerrard (in fact, Voices is basically Lisa Gerrard by numbers). Particularly on the less smooth, more left-of-centre and sinister moments like Heartbeat her silky vocal style and its capacity to do something unexpected is there for all to see.

To sum the album up in a sentence, it's a cold, bleak sonic picture which either mucks about with your head or eases you along on the ride. To sum that up in two songs, listen to both the Survival Techniques songs back-to-back and you've more or less got the picture. Definitely something I'd recommend, but it's certainly not for everyone, and it's not exactly for all moods and times either (but, then again, how many albums are anything like that anyway). It's a beautiful, graceful little album that veers from a soothing, reined-in jazz style to a more avante-garde, sometimes even slightly disturbing one. It's a grower, that's for sure.

Originally Posted by NumberNineDream I think I never looked into his 70s albums, for fear of being disappointed. Your points about this period definitely encourages me to give these albums a spin once and for all. Will keep you updated .