A few words on rock critics Bob Dylan Lovefest

Twilight Dylan: Critical love collides with reality
by Bill Melville
Nov. 16, 2006
In his old age, even rusty uneven Bob Dylan gets dipped into critical gold. After the latest spat of gushing over Modern Times, the legend's latest long-player, I can sit silent no longer; playing the Basement Tapes in the background no longer soothes me.
Not even a playback of Dylan's quirky, highly relevant satellite radio show will tame my anger at the Dylan Lovefest theme soiling nearly every review of that album. Dylan, like any number of critical darlings, earns mountains of leeway. No problem there; with his incalculable influence on popular music and a dozen records given to classic status, he deserves it.
But anytime Rolling Stone trots out a five-star review, alarms go off. Ever since they slapped “instant classic” status on Mick Jagger's Goddess in the Doorway, I must subject all future 5-star albums to blistering scrutiny.
To these ears, weaned on Dylan classic and contemporary, the prophetic and the putrid (lookin' squarely at you, Down in the Groove), the record is flat. All the critics so quick to anoint it with a five-starred crown and place it in the pantheon seemed to miss that. Nor do I see it as finishing a trilogy with the starkly introspective Time Out of Mind (a true masterpiece) and 2001's lesser yet vibrant Love and Theft.
Now down to a smoke-weakened growl, Dylan's voice barely crests above the music. He doesn't have the fortune of Willie Nelson, whose unique twangy whine wafts unchanged throughout his latest records. Modern Times shuffles along, coming nowhere near the speed of the sweet cruising machine from the 1940s adorning its cover. Signs of life creep in periodically, creep being the operative word on the closing track, “Ain't Talkin,” with Dylan snarling away to the listener's content.
But just arriving at “Ain't Talkin' is a chore – a moribund version of “The Levee's Gonna Break” contributes nothing to set it apart from versions of it written in the past century. It lacks the panache of a Time Out of Mind tune like "Cold Irons Bound" and sounds impersonal at best, and with nothing of the charming distance Dylan exhibits between the words of earlier songs.
The lyric viscosity in these songs is fleeting. Nothing close to a “Lovesick” or the brutal “Not Dark Yet” rises from the tracklist, with the exception of “Workingman's Blues #2,” which offers a delicate stylistic synthesis of two preceding albums.
Objectivity of any sort grows difficult with a Dylan record. With more than 40 to his credit, no one can sit down with a new Dylan record and judge it in a vacuum. Too many highlights precede it.
Glance back at a few decades of reviews and this becomes apparent: A pronouncement of Dylan's return to form, for whatever that means in a 40-year career of style changes, comes with almost every record from Blood on the Tracks onward.
The outrage over Self-Portrait (which famous caused Greil Marcus to open his RS review with “What is this shit?”) and other off-the-weathered-path albums has dissipated into perpetual love for the unassuming master musician. Any new Dylan drowns in praise.
Ever since the magnificent Time Out of Mind, Dylan can perform no crime. What critics overlook is a recharged Dylan unplugging to delve back into traditional music on the two previous albums to great effect, most notably on World Gone Wrong. The elder statesman phase began quietly, with only a man, his guitar and the tradition songbook from where he started.
The man has churned out visionary records and inhabits a body of work only similar giants approach. He's got nothing to prove, if he ever did in the first place.
But dig into the track record (the early 1970s, the bulk of the '80s) and not everything drowns in gold or even silver. Some of it is plain aluminum, and Modern Times dents too easily to stand up with a Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks or even the first two chapters in the "infallible" late-career trilogy hordes of critics praise it for allegedly completing. Now look at the year-end lists – it's almost a bold critical choice to go with anything else as Number 1.
Modern Times isn't terrible, nor a mistake; it just falls short of the “Epic Scale Dylan” label critics sprang too quickly to apply.