The reviews are in and critics have declared Bob Dylan’s new album his best in years. Sure, yes, certain outlets like to append that sobriquet to every one of his releases, but it’s for real this time! Take it from critical aggregator Metacritic, where Rough and Rowdy Ways sits second only to Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters as the best reviewed album of 2020 so far. (A nice coincidence, given that Apple appears on the album.)
In his five-star review, Guardian chief rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis summed up the bleak humour that runs through the album: “If you think everything has turned to shit now, Rough and Rowdy Ways keeps insisting, just you wait.” Yet, he adds, “for all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan’s most consistently brilliant set of songs in years”.
At the New Yorker, critic Amanda Petrusich described it as feeling “unusually attuned to its moment” for a Dylan album. Two months after the release of teaser single Murder Most Foul (if a 17-minute single counts as a teaser), lyrics such as “We’re gonna kill you with hatred / Without any respect / We’ll mock you and shock you / And we’ll put it in your face” hit differently, she writes. “Dylan has spent decades seeing and chronicling American injustice.”
Where Petrusich found political consistency, Pitchfork’s Sam Sodomsky located novelty in Dylan’s emotional approach. “It is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood, that comes down to meet its audience,” he writes. “In these songs, death is not a heavy fog hanging over all walks of life; it is a man being murdered as the country watches, an event with a time, place, and date. And love is not a Shakespearean riddle or a lusty joke; it is a delicate pact between two people, something you make up your mind and devote yourself to.”
While some Dylan decriers lament the quality of his latter day vocals, at Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield described his singing here as “a revelation”. He writes: “Dylan still busts out the gruff Howlin’ Wolf snarl he perfected on Tempest, but he sounds far more loose and limber, full of finesse. In raw blues stomps like Goodbye Jimmy Reed, False Prophet and Beyond the Rubicon, he’s a master of deadpan comic timing; in ballads like Key West (Philosopher Pirate), he’s all breathy calm.”
While the reviews are in, the mysteries of the album are not yet solved: as Petridis wrote, the task of unpicking the lyrics will keep Dylanologists indoors long after lockdown ends: the references to the Irish village of Ballinalee, to Buster Keaton, Dickey Betts and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921; to Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks; possibly, even, to Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River.
Now that the critics have had their moment and Rough and Rowdy Ways is finally available to stream, we want to know what you think. Post your reviews in the comments, or using the form below, and we’ll publish the best on Tuesday.
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