Fallen Angels Bob Dylan

[When In Rome]

Pre-orders have been up now for a day or two for Bob's latest outing... More classic covers in the same vein as 'Shadows In The Night'.
Anyone else taking a punt, I'm still undecided about that last one, I prefer his own musical musings than covers but hey ho...

Fallen Angels.jpg

I've pre-ordered it...

[poormadpeter2]

Well the sample of Melancholy Mood does at least seem to find him in better voice than on the last effort.

[drjohncarpenter]

Dylan knows a good song and that's what he's turning to once again with Fallen Angels. An album that boasts some of the finest lyrics ever written. It would be good to hear some new songs from Dylan, but he's hardly going wrong turning to the likes of Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. It just doesn't get any better. He's even cut a version of the wonderful On a Little Street in Singapore.

I liked Shadows in the Night and expect Fallen Angels to be equally good. Dylan is a great communicator, whether it's his own songs or the words and music of others. But these songs are not only timeless, they're incredibly robust and have qualities that can both challenge and encourage the best of the artists recording them. I'm looking forward to this album.

It helps if one is a huge fan of classic Sinatra, too.

[BobDylan]

I'll be catching his tour in June this year and look forward to hearing one or two of the new songs live. I really enjoyed the last album because it was so different and I'm equally excited for this release. Already pre-ordered it.

[drjohncarpenter]

Dylan remains a fascinating artist, a true genius in a world of wanna-bes and pretenders.

[Stvimpe]

FYI
When In Rome started a thread on Dylan's new album. I missed that when I started a thread on the album. I can't delete the thread I started, but I've added my post to this thread, and I invite everyone to post their comments here. Thanks and apologies.

Bob Dylan will be releasing his new album Fallen Angels on May 20th and will tour the US with Mavis Staples! Hope they'll come to Europe as well. Thought I'd post some news about it here. I'll add some reviews as soon as possible. Best!

Mojo: Listen To A Song From Bob Dylan’s New Fallen Angels Album

Melancholy Mood from his second album of Sinatra-inspired covers is streaming now ahead of its release on May 20. Discover the full tracklisting, too.

BOB DYLAN IS not finished with the great American songbook. Not by a long shot. Confirming the release of new album Fallen Angels on May 20, the singer-songwriter has once again taken inspiration from the golden age of Tin Pan Alley, with many of the new recordings being songs associated with Frank Sinatra. You can listen to 'Melancholy Mood' from the album below now.

Self-produced again – under his Jack Frost nom de knob-twiddlage – Dylan’s 37th studio album was recorded at Capitol Studios last year and includes songs written by Johnny Mercer, Sammy Cahn and Hoagy Carmichael.

The full Fallen Angels tracklist is:

1. Young At Heart
2. Maybe You’ll Be There
3. Polka Dots And Moonbeams
4. All The Way
5. Skylark
6. Nevertheless
7. All Or Nothing At All
8. On A Little Street In Singapore
9. It Had To Be You
10. Melancholy Mood
11. That Old Black Magic
12. Come Rain Or Come Shine

http://www.mojo4music.com/23571/listen-bob-dylan-melancholy-mood-from-fallen-angels-album/


LA Times: Bob Dylan returns to pop standards on new album Fallen Angels

The forthcoming Bob Dylan album announced recently turns out to be another collection in which Dylan interprets a dozen pop standards of the pre-rock era, the majority of them associated with Frank Sinatra. Fallen Angels, his 37th studio album, is set for release on May 20, four days before Dylan turns 75.

The first release from the album is the song 'Melancholy Mood', a Top 10 hit in 1939 for Swing Era clarinetist Artie Shaw and his band, but also recorded the same year by the Harry James Orchestra and sung by Sinatra, who was the band’s vocalist at the time.

As Sinatra often did, Dylan unhurriedly elongates words such as 'lingering' and 'whimsy' as he sings composer Walter Schumann and lyricist Vick R. Knight’s ballad of lost love and regret:

Deep in the night
I search for a trace
Of a lingering kiss, a warm embrace
But love is a whimsy
And my arms embrace an empty space

Among the other Great American Songbook choices Dylan has pulled for Fallen Angels are 'That Old Black Magic', 'Come Rain or Come Shine', 'Young at Heart' and 'All or Nothing at All'.

The new album follows Shadows in the Night from 2015, when Dylan offered up his versions of standards like 'What’ll I Do', 'Some Enchanted Evening', 'Autumn Leaves' and 'I’m a Fool to Want You'. That album drew largely positive reviews, scoring 82 on a scale of 100 at the Metacritic.com aggregate website.

When some described that album as a 'covers' record, Dylan said, “They've been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a 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.”

The Telegraph wrote of Shadows in the Night: “magine a beloved grandfather at a family gathering singing ballads of love and yearning from his lost youth, and you will get some idea of the power of this extraordinary record.”

Dylan's 2016 tour is slated to reach Southern California for stops June 11 at the Santa Barbara Bowl and June 16 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-bob-dylan-new-album-pop-standards-fallen-angels-20160408-htmlstory.html

Melancholy Mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2xBaX5awlc

..

See also http://bobdylan.com/

[When In Rome]

Cheers Stvimpe!
After a little trepidation I think I'm rather looking forward to it now since hearing a few tracks off it; ten days to go!

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk

[Stvimpe]

Here are some reviews of Dylan's Fallen Angels. The first one is from The Guardian. I'll add some others as well. Hope you enjoy reading them. Best.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/19/bob-dylan-fallen-angels-review-pop-cd-sony-columbia-american-songbook-standards

Bob Dylan Fallen Angels: unfaithful and lovely

Rating: ***

By Michael Hann

The thought strikes, part-way through Bob Dylan’s second album of standards from the mid-20th century American songbook, that it sounds like nothing so much as the unreleased soundtrack to a later Woody Allen movie. It has the same tastefully muted jazzy arrangements, the same love for the music combined with a slight sense of didacticism (Listen! You WILL love these songs as much as I do), the same oddly absurd disconnection from modernity.

The arrangements aren’t faithful in any way to those that made these songs famous – That Old Black Magic becomes a rockabilly shuffle – but there’s a certain loveliness to them. It Had To Be You had yet another lease of life on the When Harry Met Sally soundtrack in 1989, but the version here makes you think not of Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal cracking wise to each other, but to the old couples interspersed throughout that film, reminiscing about when they fell in love. Fallen Angels sounds like another love letter to Dylan’s own youth, and it’s charming. Whether you would prefer listening to his readings of the songs, rather than to those by Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and so on is entirely your choice.

[Stvimpe]

Here's a review from Ultimate Classic Rock

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-fallen-angels-review/

Bob Dylan Fallen Angels Album Review

Bob Dylan is an artist who rarely looks back. But there have been exceptions: the Christian Trilogy from the late ’70s and early ’80s, the pair of stripped-down traditional folk albums he released in the early ’90s before his comeback and now Fallen Angels, a sequel to Shadows in the Night, 2015’s nostalgic return to standards originally recorded by Frank Sinatra in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.

The first album caught a lot of fans off guard as one of rock’s most original (and cynical) voices applied his nasal croon to decades-old songs seeping in sentiment. Some of the twentieth century’s greatest singers – including Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Barbra Streisand – have tackled these numbers over the years, but Dylan’s affection for them was evident. And it’s just as evident on Fallen Angels, a dozen songs penned by such late greats as Sammy Cahn, Johnny Mercer and Jimmy Van Heusen.

And it goes down easier this time around, with the initial surprise of hearing one of rock’s most abrasive, polarizing and greatest singers cozy up to well-worn standards replaced by the rich and warm tones Dylan consistently manages here. It’s a long way from “Positively 4th Street,” but so is his much of his catalog by now.

The arrangements have always been key to these songs, whether given lush orchestral padding or stripped down to their most late-night desperate. Dylan’s takes on Fallen Angels fall somewhere in between, coaxing sensitive performances from the band while staying true to the timeless melodies that have kept these songs in the public consciousness for decades. Sticking with the traditional instrumentation and deliberate vocal phrasing that have driven his albums for the past 20 years, Dylan covers these ballads like an old pro. They suit him just as he much as he’s suited to them at this point in his long career.

It’s no accident that “Young at Heart” leads the set. Sinatra launched a commercial comeback with his 1953 version, heralding both a new chapter in his musical life and signaling his most creative period. Dylan makes the song, and its lyrics (the title reflects the content), a statement of purpose and introduction. You’re only as old as you want to be, says Dylan (who’ll turn 75 on May 24) – or, as Carolyn Leigh’s classic words put it, “Life gets more exciting with each passing day.”

It’s a bit jarring at first to hear the author of such barbed put-downs as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Idiot Wind” embrace such a greeting-card attitude. But if Dylan is winking at us, he sure doesn’t let on. He delivers “All the Way,” “Melancholy Mood” and “Come Rain or Come Shine” with equal warmth and sincerity. Whatever cynicism greeted Dylan on Shadows in the Night disappears with this expertly executed follow-up.

That’s not to say Dylan doesn’t seem a bit ill-fitted to the material at times. A more delicate singer is occasionally needed – “It Had to Be You” sounds stiff, while “Polkadots and Moonbeams” and “Skylark” could use softer touches – and the creakiness of some of the tunes can’t help but reveal themselves. This isn’t an essential Dylan album like Blonde on Blonde or even Modern Times, but there’s just as much commitment to the material as there was to the songs on those records.
And unlike other aging rockers’ forays into the genre (see Rod Stewart‘s four commercially successful but increasingly tiresome standards collections), Dylan makes it all sound so effortless on Fallen Angels. It’s an attribute he’s been applying to his music for years, whether hitching onto Woody Guthrie’s train on his debut, plugging into an electric dynamic on Bringing It All Back Home, surveying his crumbling marriage on Blood on the Tracks or gazing at mortality on Tempest. Sometimes looking back is the easiest thing to do.


Read More: Bob Dylan, 'Fallen Angels': Album Review | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-fallen-angels-review/?trackback=tsmclip

[Stvimpe]

Rolling Stone on Fallen Angels

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/bob-dylan-fallen-angels-20160519

Rolling Stone: Dylan does Sinatra, chapter 2

By Will Hermes

Rating: 3.5

Dylan plumbs his good ideas fully: consider the mid-'60s rock'n'roll speed-trial of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde, or his fin de siècle roots trilogy Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. So it's unsurprising that Fallen Angels continues his Great American Songbook foraging via songs made famous by Frank Sinatra, whose colloquial delivery he evidently learned plenty from, and whose massive catalog includes many of the best songs ever written. It's really not far removed from where Dylan began, taking America's temperature through traditional folk and blues.

Fallen Angels isn't merely overstock from last year's Shadows In The Night, though Dylan's approach is similar. His phrasing remains spectacular, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, and the playing is sublime. The horns are gone – no big loss – and the core band is nicely expanded with session guitar legend Dean Parks (Steely Dan, Dolly Parton, Marvin Gaye). Donny Herron steps up, adding Texas swing and Hawaiian flavors on steel guitar ("Young at Heart," "Polka Dots and Moonbeams") and using viola to channel Hot Club jazziness. Songs date mostly to the '40s and '50s, with a spotlight on rhyme animal lyricist Johnny Mercer. Two highlights, "Skylark" and "That Old Black Magic," are both reputed to be about Mercer's lover, Judy Garland. Are they the "fallen angels" of the title? Is Dylan messaging his own paramour? Is this another trilogy in the making?

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/bob-dylan-fallen-angels-20160519#ixzz49BjVMHKv
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

[Stvimpe]

Review from The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/bob-dylan-fallen-angels-review-the-singer-s-oft-criticised-vocals-shine-here-a7036211.html


Bob Dylan, Fallen Angels review: The singer’s oft-criticised vocals shine here

Rating: ****

The restrained picking and creamy pedal-steel guitar of his live band imposes a smooth but demotic country mood behind Dylan’s elegant, world-weary croon.

Download: Melancholy Mood; All The Way; Skylark; It Had To Be You; All Or Nothing At All

Dylan’s second volume of Great American Songbook interpretations continues in similar vein to last year’s Shadows In The Night, the main difference being the virtual absence, save for “Maybe You’ll Be There”, of the brooding, crepuscular horns that tracked the singer’s melancholy mood.

Instead, the restrained picking and creamy pedal-steel guitar of his live band imposes a smooth but demotic country mood behind Dylan’s elegant, world-weary croon as he tackles such circumlocuitous romantic rhetoric as “Is there a meadow in the mist where someone’s waiting to be kissed?” and “Down in a cottage built of lilacs and laughter, I know the meaning of the words ever after”.

Even for one well-schooled in delivering the complex, polysyllabic locutions of self-written songs such as “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Visions Of Johanna”, this sort of lyrical trickery – from Johnny Mercer and Johnny Burke, respectively – requires careful negotiation not to pierce the meniscus of believability that gives the songs their enduring power.

And to his credit, Dylan copes remarkably well for one so routinely criticised as a vocalist. Even when he strains to keep in key or pitch, he manages to make a virtue of his shortcomings, bringing a sense of long-distance exhaustion to “All The Way”, and applying a sort of Gallic shrug to “All Or Nothing At All”, in stark contrast to the jauntier tone of Frank Sinatra’s and Billie Holiday’s interpretations.

Elsewhere, his weary groan through “Young At Heart” makes for an amusing contrast with the song’s theme, while his enervated delivery of “Come Rain Or Come Shine” suggests the promised alliance is a matter of support being required rather than devotion proferred. By contrast, he’s excited and enraptured by “That Old Black Magic”, although the dashing tempo as it whisks along is completely out of step with the rest of the album, which is probably best represented by the besotted abjection of “Melancholy Mood”, where the lines “whatever haunts me, steals upon me in the night, forever taunts me” evoke the beguiling nature of these fallen angels.

[Stvimpe]

From the Consequence of Sound.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/05/album-review-bob-dylan-fallen-angels/

Bob Dylan: Fallen Angels

The winter shadows have lifted on the legend's latest collection of Sinatra covers.

Nobody ever expected Bob Dylan to release an album of old standards popularized by Frank Sinatra. Even as he teased last year’s Shadows in the Night with lead single “Full Moon and Empty Arms”, the notion still seemed too strange to be true. Never mind that this same artist once turned inward and “plugged in” just as his acoustic strum and nasal register had become emblematic of the ’60s folk movement; quickly fled his bully pulpit and turned recluse a couple years later after having been anointed the voice of his generation; or suddenly became “saved” in the ’80s only to release a series of albums that would’ve made both Jesus and Judas cry out: “Father, forgive him, for he knows not what he does.” Dylan has always been out of step with our expectations, and yet when we first heard him sadly wishing upon the same moon Ol’ Blue Eyes once did, the concept seemed not only unthinkable but utterly doomed to failure. A year later, how things have changed.

Shadows in the Night succeeded because it never settled for being a curated sampler — a gimmicky album that could’ve been dubbed something like Bob Gets Frank. Instead, Dylan crafted a record with themes of pining, loneliness, and love kindled, lost, or enduring that cast long shadows deep into the night. He smoothed out his voice, stripped the arrangements of any excess, and tapped into what makes those sad songs eternal — as relatable to the rejected teen texting in his bedroom as the old man who only has worn photographs to remind him of a love that’s faded. Now, a year later, those shadows have lifted, and Fallen Angels finds Dylan emerging from the gloomy stillness of winter into the relatively lighter air of springtime.

Dylan doesn’t waste a single note before differentiating the vibe of this record. “Fairy tales can come true,” he promises on familiar opener “Young at Heart” (a brochure on the perks of remaining “Forever Young”). His voice splits the difference between Sinatra’s olive oil delivery and Jimmy Durante’s animated playfulness. Clearly, if Shadows in the Night is Dylan’s Only the Lonely, then Fallen Angels acts as his Come Fly with Me — or as close as he can muster. Since we last left him, his protagonists have gone from empty-armed (“Full Moon and Empty Arms”) to full-sailed (“On a Little Street in Singapore”); from melancholy resignation (“The Night We Called It a Day”) to foolish hopefulness (“Maybe You’ll Be There”); and from being cursed to share a woman’s affections (“I’m a Fool to Want You”) to settling for nothing less than “All or Nothing at All” when it comes to love. A changing of seasons has surely thawed more than just the ground on Fallen Angels — hearts are on the mend and rebound.

While Dylan’s once-broken protagonists have emerged from their quiet brooding and put themselves out into the world again, they aren’t doing so naively expecting love to be perfect. The best moments on Fallen Angels capture this ambivalence. On “Maybe You’ll Be There”, a man takes the first steps at moving on from heartbreak but can’t stop himself from looking back in the hopes that she might return. “Maybe I’ll win, and maybe I’ll lose/ And maybe I’m in for crying the blues,” Dylan wades into a relationship atop flickering pedal steel and soft-brushed percussion on “Nevertheless”. The odds might be less than ideal and the risks terrifying, but as he resolves: “Nevertheless, I’m in love with you.” Still, maybe love is out of all their hands. On “It Had to Be You”, Dylan points the finger squarely at Fate when it comes to finding that one person out there who “could make me be true, could make me be blue.” Maybe the five playing cards on the album’s cover offer as good a metaphor as any — not all of the men in these songs have winning hands, but you also can’t win if you fold or, worse yet, never sit down at the table. They’re at least in the game again.

If there’s a recurring flaw in Dylan’s recent albums (Shadows in the Night excluded), it would be the editing. “All the Way” should be this record’s absolute stunner, but Dylan ignores a perfect conclusion, opting to extend the song, meddle with its momentum, and painfully strain his voice on the final lines. It’s a gorgeous rendition sabotaged by nearly two minutes of excess. Contrarily, closing number “Come Rain or Come Shine” cuts off just as Dylan has a chance to end emphatically in the way “That Lucky Old Sun” concludes Shadows. Dylan may naturally be better at the brooding that Shadows required, but these types of decisions equally prevent Fallen Angels from matching its predecessor.

One of Dylan’s more famous lyrics cautions that “he not busy being born is busy dying.” Ironically, it’s often been easy to mistake Dylan’s rebirths for death knells. His last pair of covers albums — 1992’s Good as I Been to You and 1993’s World Gone Wrong — which once felt like a creative white flag being raised, now can be viewed as the first hints of Dylan’s late ’90s reemergence. Are Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels a final act, or are they merely the preamble to the next encore? At nearly 75 years old, Bob Dylan still has us guessing.

Essential Tracks: “It Had to Be You”, “Nevertheless”, and “All the Way”

[When In Rome]

Thanks Stvimpe. Hope to have my copy later today...

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk

[When In Rome]

Busy old day; gonna have listen to it properly tomorrow 'on the road' at work. However, just opened the CD and there's no song writing credits anywhere. That really bugs me! Just had a look on Wikipedia and there is a list there. I know they're standards but not everyone knows who wrote 'em!
Loving 'Young At Heart' by Ol' Bob!

[Stvimpe]

Some more reviews...

Pitchfork: Bob Dylan Fallen Angels

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21939-fallen-angels/

Following on last year's Frank Sinatra tribute Shadows in the Night, Dylan's latest finds him once again putting his own idiosyncratic spin on a set of standards.

Rating: 6.5/10

ou can go all the way back to the beginning of “What the **** is Bob Dylan doing now?” and find jazz. “Peggy Day” from Nashville Skyline—his first detour into melodic crooning—is snappy Western swing; following that was Self Portrait’s notorious take on Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” and New Morning’s hepcat pastiche, “If Dogs Run Free.” Dylan’s earliest Frank Sinatra tribute dates back five decades and only found its first official release in 2014: the addled Basement Tapes-era riff on the Johnny Mercer classic “One for My Baby (One More for the Road).”

None of this, however, made the advent of his Standards Period last year any less of a surprise. Some of the initial shock was the result of the growing stigma around the aging-rocker-does-the-American-songbook format, not the fact that Dylan would offer his own version. As he himself acknowledged in his labyrinthine Musicares acceptance speech last year, this sort of record has become a convention—a profitable one. At this point, any new release in this vein scans as something more sordid than a stocking-stuffer: an empty money grab.

Dylan’s particular, oddball point in bringing up the trend was to illustrate the absurd degree to which he was still viewed as a man apart. Why did people pore over Shadows in the Night any more than Rod Stewart’s latest compilation? “In their reviews no one says anything,” Dylan demurred. “In my reviews, they’ve got to look under every stone and report about it.”

But his point doesn’t quite land. After all, Shadows, and Dylan’s second standards set, Fallen Angels, don’t bear much resemblance to the market standard. The latter’s arrangements recall a time and place that never existed—a mythical dive halfway between a resurrected smoky East Village club and, when drooping pedal steel figures dominate the action, a Texas barroom. When creaky cellos and horn soloists crop up, Tom Waits’ more muted '00s output comes to mind. But this atmosphere sounds like a byproduct of who could make it to the session, how much rehearsal they had time for between tour dates, what Dylan ate yesterday; it doesn’t come over as carefully cultivated.

Dylan doesn’t put a clear twist on this music; it twists him. Devotees judge performers of early–20th-century standards on their ability to interpret—whether they can shape and communicate a song’s meaning with some degree of musical cleverness. But Dylan simply delivers them. In the process, he tends to draw out the strangeness inherent in the compositions rather than making them sound effusive and natural. On opener “Young at Heart,” the close rhyme schemes and overstuffed lines (“Look at all you’ll derive out of being alive…”) draw attention to themselves. On the ubiquitous “Come Rain or Come Shine,” there’s so much precedent for logical ways to approach this song that one can't help but feel like Dylan is deliberately trying to muck it up. “We’re in or we’re out of the money” is faxed out mechanically, the contrast inherent in the line absent.

The languid pacing—often, as down-tempo you could reasonably take these songs—often improves matters. So while Dylan’s breezy take on Hoagy Carmichael’s greatest triumph “Skylark” is a dead-eyed, aberrant disaster, his pliable, conversational intro to the Casablanca/When Harry Met Sally…-famous “It Had to Be You” feels inviting. But some shifts in pacing work. Blonde on Blonde’s amphetamines are a things of decades past, but perhaps some young engineer handed Dylan his first 5-hour Energy to carry off “That Old Black Magic," Angels’ closest thing to a barnburner. Here, words spring off Dylan’s lips, rather than becoming saltwater in his throat; his ever-odder, geographically indeterminate accent stays out of the way. He chuckles a bit on the final triumphant release, as if he’s stunned even himself.

The axioms in the songs on Fallen Angels were written to speak to various familiar moments of the human experience. With Dylan, though, the universal “truth” in these compositions—that word is littered throughout his Musicares tirade—doesn’t reflect easily, or even deliberately uneasily, back on him. In his muse Sinatra’s case, of course, such truth came easy: The singer was at the bar until last call in both the tabloids and on his albums, probably bemoaning Ava Gardner’s latest tryst. But there’s no clear through-line to Fallen Angels’ subject matter, no point of view.

The final product, then, feels adrift: just off the coast of delivering a discrete emotional impact, offering a sporadic, self-reflexive charm for fans who smile at Dylan’s every left turn, whether in spite of themselves or on principle. In other words, it’s a new Dylan album: the product of a life ritual no one can fathom, but which is doubtless way more typical than one might think; perennially modest; worth a faithful fan’s money.

[Stvimpe]

MOJO: Fallen Angels

http://www.mojo4music.com/24033/bob-dylan-fallen-angels/

Dylan reverts once more to his first language of song, and beautifully.

Rating: 4/5

Back when the formative ’50s took off into the soaraway ’60s, the generation gap between the parental bow-tie daddy and turned-on baby boomer was a gulf, and it extended to almost everything. Each had their figureheads, bugbears 
and touchstones. Though he never went to war, for America’s Greatest Generation Frank Sinatra had soundtracked every step of the way, from the run-up to Pearl Harbor to Ike’s peacetime cornucopia; the Hoboken Canary was the well-tailored everyman who sang and swung romance into every spanking new split-level suburban home with its pool-table front lawn and two-car driveway.

For their children, Dylan’s generation with its intellectual and emotional boot-heels set to wandering, Sinatra was a corporate lifestyle shill, Chairman of the Boring and Mayor of Squaresville compared to outsider cats in hats whether cooling the clubs like Mingus and Miles or tearing it up in the backwoods like Guthrie and Williams. For Mom and Pop, better dead than Red; for Junior, better Hank than Frank.

“In Harold Arlen I could hear rural blues and folk. There was an emotional kinship.”

Even half a century after this cultural war raged at its height, eyebrows lifted when in 2014 Bob Dylan cut a bunch of songs, 10 of them released last year as Shadows In The Night, famously sung by Sinatra.

Fundamentalists of the idea of Dylan having reset Year Zero on the American songcraft clock can’t say they weren’t warned. A few of these Tin Pan Alley songs have popped up in his setlists since the ’90s, and in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan recalls finding Judy Garland’s hit The Man That Got Away on a New York beatnik hang-out’s jukebox. Its tunesmith was Harold Arlen, famous for the “cosmic” Over The Rainbow. “In Harold’s songs I could hear rural blues and folk music. There was an emotional kinship there. I couldn’t help but notice it.” With lyricist Johnny Mercer, Arlen also wrote That Old Black Magic and Come Rain Or Come Shine, both of which Dylan sings here.

What Dylan gives us in these recordings is something of a sentimental memoir. Though his creative journey from Bobby to ‘Dylan’ started at around 10 years old when hearing Johnnie Ray on the radio and then Hank Williams broadcast on the Grand Ole Opry, our hero’s first musical performance predated this conscious quickening of his musical spirit: aged four at a family party he brought the house down with his renditions of Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive and Some Sunday Morning, songs of sweetness and pep for the folks at home with seemingly nothing in common with his thrillingly modern yet deep-rooted songs two decades later, save for the raw materials from which they were crafted – words, melody and harmony. Yet he has form as a writer in this idiom in such songs as 2001’s Moonlight, arguably even 1969’s Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You.

“These covers have re-energised Dylan on-stage. For that alone, three cheers.”

Following Shadows In The Night, Fallen Angels’ 12 songs are the second batch from the 23 recorded in Hollywood’s famed Capitol Records’ Studio B in 2014. All but Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s Skylark were recorded by Sinatra; some songs famously, like Young At Heart, others, like On A Little Street In Singapore, less so. As a singer, Dylan is no Sinatra, of course, carefully tracking as best he can at his age this repertoire’s melodic contours, with expressive phrasing a lesser priority, 
in contrast to the liberties he takes on his own less melodically intricate songs.

These covers have re-energised Dylan on-stage, where he feels he is most truly doing his job as a troubadour. For that alone, three cheers. In all its dimensions, latter-day Dylan may be the greatest efflorescence of artistry in playful old age since Eric Rohmer or even Picasso. In Skylark, which Bob sings delightfully here, lyricist Johnny Mercer seems almost to be describing his unlikely interpreter as he bobs and weaves round the world stage in his skittishly magnetic victory lap:

“And in your lonely flight/Haven’t you heard the music in the night/Wonderful music/Faint as a will o’ the wisp, crazy as a loon/Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon.”

[When In Rome]

I've listened to it a few times and while I find it more palatable than the last album (Shadows In The Night) and I do have a few favourites on here, I must confess, overall I get the impression this is a little self-indulgence from Bob and whilst some tracks work, others just don't. In my humble opinion, of course!
I hope Bob's got this out of his system now and has a new all original album waiting in the wings... though judging by Dylan's track record he could just as easily pop up with an album full of ABBA covers!

[Stvimpe]

I've listened to it a few times and while I find it more palatable than the last album (Shadows In The Night) and I do have a few favourites on here, I must confess, overall I get the impression this is a little self-indulgence from Bob and whilst some tracks work, others just don't. In my humble opinion, of course!
I hope Bob's got this out of his system now and has a new all original album waiting in the wings... though judging by Dylan's track record he could just as easily pop up with an album full of ABBA covers!

Thanks for your comments, When In Rome.

I agree, I'd prefer Dylan making a record with original material. But perhaps Bawb has spoilt us too much with great records. -> high expectations, too high?

But Bawb doing ABBA, that would be brilliant

[Stvimpe]

For those sitting on the fence, you can listen to samples of all songs via

http://www.allmusic.com/album/fallen-angels-mw0002936731

Best!