Bob Dylan
Fallen Angels

Album Release Date: May 20th, 2016

Fallen Angels is the second consecutive Bob Dylan album comprised entirely of cover versions of American classics. Like its predecessor Shadows in the Night (2015), all of the album's 12 songs (except for "Skylark") were once recorded by Frank Sinatra. An iconic singer-songwriter (and recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature), 75-year-old Dylan is one of few true living legends to be still currently active in the music industry. With a career spanning over 55 years, he continues to record and tour extensively.

Some fans lament Dylan's recent move to covering previously recorded material, and long for more of his own new original songs. But I find the great artist's late-career direction appropriate as he interprets popular standards from a bygone era, comfortably shifting through a range of American music genres from country to jazz. After all, Dylan began his recording career with an album almost exclusively comprised of folk standards, and had several other similar entries throughout his career, such as Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993). Following the release of Shadows in the Night, Dylan commented in a Rolling Stone interview: "I don't see myself as covering these songs in any way. They've been covered enough. Buried, as a matter of fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day." And the same could be said of Fallen Angels. It's another element added into the repertoire of a brilliant artist who's continually explored complex layers of Americana. And who knows, he may record more original material yet, as this album marks his 37th official release, and with countless times as many more bootleg, compilation, and/or live albums' worth of material, his prolific creative output has rarely been matched in recording arts history.

What immediately stands out to me on Fallen Angels is Dylan's voice—a quality that for decades has been the focus of much condemnation, bafflement, and parody. Throughout his career, Dylan's vocals have manifested an excessively nasally timbre and occasionally indecipherable, mumbling cadence, fluctuating to higher or lower degrees of intelligibility in various performances and recordings. Sometimes he'd inexplicably flummox listeners, such as on Nashville Skyline (1969) in which he introduced a radically new singing voice, with an open-throated, soft country croon. Echoes of this same vocal style are heard in his following album Self Portrait (1970) as well, which also apparently contains the only ever instances of Dylan attempting to sing overdubbed vocal harmonies on a record. But he's always retained some measure of nasal-based inflection, with his voice becoming generally lower in tone, more gravelly, as he's aged. And some time around 2001's Love and Theft the vocal raspiness accelerated even more, and continued to grow on subsequent albums into a fully rough, husky croak that would've made Louis Armstrong proud.

Dylan detractors never understood that his vocal stylings actually heighten his character and appeal, as he often sings from the perspective of a world-weary outlaw whose poetic muse is an exiled revolutionary of sorts—a contemplative narrator exuding sympathy for the underdog through detailed stories of love and loss. This creative persona has become enmeshed with Dylan's many other celebrity/artist personas; a modern-day troubadour, counterculture icon, poetic prophet, rock star, and now a legendary elder music man who has lived many varied experiences, aspects of which are no doubt reflected through the characters he so often sings about.

But then, on Shadows in the Night, the excessively deep, throaty vocalization that he'd exhibited in increasing fashion on his previous several albums was suddenly dialed back, resembling the still raspy but overall lighter, clearer, and more melodious voice of a man considerably younger than his then-73 years. I don't know how much of this might be contributed to technical studio magic, or if Dylan finally quit smoking, or both, but it's nonetheless compelling. Or maybe because of the traditional content Dylan was trying extra hard with his singing—to honour the songs—putting less emphasis on the weathered storyteller persona that's so often prevalent in his own original material. In any case, that voice has persisted with Fallen Angels. Again, still a gruff, growly voice by the standards of many, but considerably smoother and more lucid than before.

Whatever the reasons, it was a good choice by Dylan to sing in as "good" and clear of a voice as he could, as it does indeed complement the decidedly mellow content of the album, with arrangements that are stripped down and plain, accentuating the unembellished beauty of the ballads. The dozen songs form a cohesive whole, each track resonating with understated elegance and romantic sentimentality, evoking a quiet nostalgia.

It makes for a good listen at dinner parties, on a rainy evening, or anytime one wants to just chill out and relax. Some may yearn for the poetic, complex, intellectually and emotionally resonant songs of past Dylan, but his large catalogue is there to revisit at any time. And I find works like Fallen Angels rather pleasant and refreshing, as Bob Dylan has evolved into a distinguished elder gentleman making music that suits his years, rather than trying to hang on to or recapture some kind of decadent rock'n'roll glory like so many aging music stars do all too often.
• Nik Dobrinsky / Boy Drinks Ink
July 2nd, 2016