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Bob Dylan: Fallen Angels

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Columbia Records
Released: 2016.05.20
Time:
 37:50
Category: Traditional Pop
Producer(s): Jack Frost
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.bobdylan.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2016
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Young at Heart (Johnny Richards, Carolyn Leigh) - 2:59
[2] Maybe You’ll Be There (Rube Bloom, Sammy Gallop) - 2:56
[3] Polka Dots and Moonbeams (Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Burke) - 3:20
[4] All the Way (Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn) - 4:01
[5] Skylark (Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer) - 2:56
[6] Nevertheless (Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar) - 3:27
[7] All or Nothing at All (Arthur Altman, Jack Lawrence) - 3:04
[8] On a Little Street in Singapore (Peter DeRose, Billy Hill) - 2:15
[9] It Had to Be You (Isham Jones, Gus Kahn) - 3:39
[10] Melancholy Mood (Walter Schumann, Vick R. Knight, Sr.) - 2:53
[11] That Old Black Magic (Harold Arlen, Mercer) - 3:04
[12] Come Rain or Come Shine (Arlen, Mercer) - 2:37

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Bob Dylan - Vocals

Charlie Sexton - Guitar
Stu Kimball - Guitar
Dean Parks - Guitar
Donnie Herron - Steel Guitar, Viola
Tony Garnier - Bass
George Recile - Drums

Jack Frost - Producer
Al Schmitt - Mixing and Engineering
Steve Genewick - Assistant Engineering
James Harper - Horn Arrangements, Conducting
Greg Calbi - Mastering
Geoff Gans - Album Artwork

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2016 CD Columbia 8898530802
2016 CD Columbia 88985316001

Recorded in February 2015-March 2016 at Capitol Studios, Los Angeles, U.S.



Fallen Angels may have been recorded at the same session as 2015's moody Shadows in the Night, but its tone is very different. Call Fallen Angels the Nice 'n' Easy to the No One Cares of Shadows in the Night: they're both tributes to Frank Sinatra, but the 2016 album is light at heart. It's filled with songs of love, not heartbreak, and Dylan's band plays the numbers as sweet shuffles that function as a counterpart to the gloomy saloon tunes that filled Shadows in the Night. Another distinction of Fallen Angels is that, unlike its cousin, some of the featured songs are quite common: "Young at Heart," "All the Way," "It Had to Be You," and "Come Rain or Come Shine" often pop up on Great American Songbook tributes, whereas the compositions on Shadows often felt carefully curated. Such familiar tunes - which are offset by such nifty excavations as "Maybe You'll Be There," "On a Little Street in Singapore," and "Skylark," the only song here not recorded by Sinatra - help draw attention to Dylan's interpretations. Supported by his trusted touring band, he pushes these songs into the realm of a dusty roadhouse, letting "That Old Black Magic" skip along to a swift danceable beat, turning "Polka Dots and Moonbeams" into a country ramble, playing "Melancholy Mood" as an after-hours blues. These wise, wily interpretations underscore Dylan's ultimate aim with these Sinatra records, which is to slyly tie together various strands of American music, bringing Tin Pan Alley to the barrooms and taking the backwoods uptown. The results are understated yet extraordinary, an idiosyncratic, romantic vision of 20th century America.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



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.

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.

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.”

Mat Snow - May 18, 2016
MOJO © Bauer Consumer Media



Every now and then, a new-model Bob Dylan comes along to replace the old one, much to the delight or consternation of fans. Some Dylans have been better than others. Most everyone digs the idealistic protest singer, the wild-eyed rock ’n’ roll Picasso, and the reclusive basement taper. Fewer miss the live Bob Dylan At Budokan Vegas bandleader, the Christian zealot, or the guy in the ’80s with the blazers and earrings.

Somewhere in between is Dylan the Great American Songbook crooner. That’s the one found on Fallen Angels, the rock legend’s second consecutive collection of standards that are mostly associated with Frank Sinatra. (Ol’ Blue Eyes recorded 11 of these 12 tunes.) While this latest Dylan arrived at a strange and unfortunate time—right in the midst of a late-career hot streak spanning 1997’s Time Out Of Mind to 2012’s Tempest—he’s worth having around.

Compared to last year’s Shadows In The Night, this second standards set, recorded at the same time, is a lighter, less elegiac affair. The sonics are naturally the same, Dylan leading a tiny ensemble featuring upright bass, occasional percussion, and acoustic, electric, and pedal-steel guitars. But he trades lovers’ laments like “I’m A Fool To Want You” and “Where Are You?” for sunnier tunes like opener “Young At Heart.” If he figures everyone will snicker at the voice of the ’60s counterculture singing like a twinkly-eyed old coot, he never winks back. In so many of these tracks—the rosy-cheeked “Polkadots And Moonbeams” and the sublime violin-aided take on Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s masterful “Skylark”—it’s Dylan moving gently and gracefully through material he obviously loves.

About the singing: Yes, Dylan’s voice is a suitcase that’s been kicked down a few too many streets, but the leather is smooth enough, and it’ll still hold whatever feelings Bob needs it to. There’s hopefulness on “Maybe You’ll Be There,” outfitted with lovely violins and horns, and romantic determination on “All Or Nothing At All,” a jazzy number with a swinging beat and down-stroked electric chords. The latter, like “Melancholy Mood,” could’ve fit on Love And Theft or any of the subsequent records Dylan made in his old-timey, blues-rocking Mark Twain guise.

For whippersnappers, Fallen Angels is a reminder that great poetry and complex emotions existed in American song well before 1962. The slightest track, “On A Little Street In Singapore,” might be the most intriguing, with its surfy guitar and intimate performance; at one point you can hear Dylan inhaling, perhaps imagining whiffs of Shalimar. The other notable changeup is “That Old Black Magic,” a wire-brush galloper that moves almost like a ’60s Elvis cut.

After two albums of pop standards, it’s unclear whether this Dylan will get another wear out of his tux. Maybe we’ll see the return of that resurgent craftsman of the ’00s or the arrival of a new character. If this Dylan does cede the spotlight to another one, he’ll have left on a high note, deserving of a curtain call.

Kenneth Partridge - May 20, 2016
© Copyright 2016 Onion



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.
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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.

Rating: 4/5

Andy Gill - 18 May 2016
The Independent



Last year, when Bob Dylan released a collection of songs associated with ultimate crooner Frank Sinatra, fans braced for the icon’s most WTF album since his 2009 set of Christmas tunes. But the standards album, titled Shadows in the Night, proved so moving and engaged, it inspired a deserved sequel, Fallen Angels, a mere fourteen months later.

Like its predecessor, Dylan’s 37th studio album collects American classics written by the likes of Howard Arlen, Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer. Though most of these songs were hits for Sinatra, they’ve all been covered by thousands. And like Shadows, Dylan cut this collection live, much of it in Capitol Records’ famed Studio B, with the same tight group of musicians, who repeat their chamber-jazz approach: soft brushes on George Recile’s snare drum provide the backbone, while filigrees of Donnie Harron’s pedal-steal guitar waft and strokes of his viola dab. The instruments evoke rather than declare; arrangements remain just spare enough to let the instruments dream. While Dylan may be the focus, two of the tracks (“Melancholy Mood” and “That Old Black Magic”) manage to captivate even before the vocals begin.

Which takes us to the heart and soul of Angels. Dylan alights on these words with a wry delicacy. His voice may be husky and damaged from decades of performing, but there’s beauty to its character. Tellingly, he delivers these songs of love lost and cherished not with a burning passion but with the wistfulness of experience. They’re memory songs now, intoned with a present sense of commitment. Released just four days ahead of his 75th birthday, they couldn’t be more age-appropriate.

The choice of material here poses several telling parallels. Standards likes these and Dylan¹s own songs now stand as equal American totems. Likewise, both catalogues showcase some of the best lyrics of the last century. The artist from the ’60s who wrote the couplet “My love she speaks like silence/Without ideals or violence” would appreciate the verse of Vick R. Knight Sr. in “Melancholy Mood,” which reads, “Love is a whimsey, and flimsy as lace/And my arms embrace the empty space.” As the instruments circle those lyrics like ghosts, Dylan sings them with the wink that replaces young love’s ache.

Jim Farber -  May 17 2016
Copyright © 2016 Entertainment Weekly



At this point in his legendary career, Bob Dylan is doing what he’s always done best: ripping up the rulebook. Whether it’s going electric, collaborating with Johnny Cash, turning into a Christian fundamentalist, or becoming a wily old bard, Dylan has always changed direction faster than the wind blows.

The aforementioned collaboration with Cash on Nashville Skyline is one of the only moments in his recording career where Dylan showcased his true singing voice—until the release of last year’s Shadows in the Night collection, where he sang a batch of standards from the venerable Frank Sinatra. That release puzzled even the most loyal of Dylan fans; since when had Dylan, the poet of the counterculture, shown affection for a man who was the very definition of the status quo?

Yet here we are with Fallen Angels, where Dylan doubles down on his Sinatra admiration. On Shadows in the Night, Dylan sang—in his true voice—a number of songs that explored themes of loss, loneliness, and other elements that seemed to reveal him grappling with his mortality. Fallen Angels also deals with a murky future—Dylan is turning seventy-five—but this time things are a bit brighter. No one will confuse the Dylan of this record for his swashbuckling younger self; that’s what makes Fallen Angels the perfect accompaniment to its predecessor.

Songs like album opener “Young at Heart” may not reflect his notoriously sharp-witted persona, but they do offer the dual meaning that Dylan usually intends on his albums. The choice of that song in particular has the feel of a man who’s coming to grips with his own destiny. Though he’s never been one to embrace the media nor give away his creative process, Dylan loves leaving Easter eggs for his fans to dissect. By keeping the song’s structure close to the original, he hints that he’s not giving up on living, though he may be tapped out creatively.

What makes Dylan’s take on Sinatra interesting, like last time, is his song selection. He mostly uses cuts like the early Sinatra hit “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” and “It Had to Be You” to produce a narrative that shows him as a lounge singer winking at the fans who can’t quite figure out the direction he’s taking them in. Hearing Dylan attempt to swing is as humorous as anything he’s ever done, and certainly cognizant of this fact, his focusing on Sinatra’s big-band era is a way for him to have genuine fun while retaining his ambiguity.

Throughout his career, Dylan has been an expert at challenging, surprising and frustrating his fans. With many of them entering their own twilight years, he delivers yet another curveball. Are these albums the longtime boxing fan’s way of throwing in the towel on songwriting, or is it his way of taking a timeout before another great period of fluid songwriting? It’s a question that makes the concept of Fallen Angels more intriguing than the output itself.

Rating: 5/10

Daniel Kohn - May 23rd 2016
FLOOD Magazine



With Fallen Angels, Bob Dylan, like Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart before him, has seen fit to continue his exploration of the Great American Songbook begun with such unexpected poise and humility on last year’s Shadows In The Night.

In his case, however, it’s not been a completely untrammelled ransacking of the hundreds of possible standards; instead, Dylan has continued to restrict his choice to those songs which conform loosely to a mood of weary resignation, extending the engaging crepuscular mood of Shadows In The Night, with Tony Garnier’s bowed bass and Donny Herron’s creamy pedal steel guitar oozing along like a slow-flowing river, carrying Dylan’s warm, weatherbeaten croon on songs such as “Melancholy Mood” and “It Had To Be You” like Huck Finn laid in a rowboat, a straw dangling from the corner of his mouth.

Following his able negotiation of the latter’s spoken intro, the band slides into the song like a lazy snake slithering into water. Dylan sings with a sigh in his voice, emphasising the theme of acquiescence to a beloved’s shortcomings: “For nobody else gave me a thrill/With all your faults, I love you still”. It’s a delivery which restores a sense of caution to the oldest song here (1924), one which has, through its appearance in countless movies including Casablanca, Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally, become disinfected of this more circumspect interpretation, and re-cast as the evocation of inevitable attraction.

As with its predecessor, Fallen Angels features many songs from the Sinatra repertoire, including “Polkadots And Moonbeams”, Frankie’s first hit with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Here, acoustic guitar heralds pedal steel flourishes over a slow drum shuffle in a long, 90-second intro before Dylan arrives, serenading his memory of a dancefloor encounter, and its subsequent consummation “in a cottage built of lilacs and laughter”, an image of bucolic bliss you’d never find flowing from his pen, surely.

Ironically, a year before Sinatra’s 1940 success with “Polkadots And Moonbeams”, he and Harry James’ band were fired from their Hollywood club residency specifically for performing “All Or Nothing At All”, which the club owner considered a room-clearer with no redeeming virtues. Which shows what he knew: five years later, it was one of the singer’s most popular songs. Here, Dylan’s dismissive inflection, borne on a gentle country vamp, applies a sort of Gallic shrug to the song; and while he strains for the rise in the bridge, it does lend a certain confirmation to the line “My heart may go dizzy and fall” at its end.

Billie Holiday, never one to overplay any potential hint of desolation, gave a far jauntier interpretation of “All Or Nothing At All”, and as for Sinatra, his 1966 revisiting of it with Nelson Riddle swung, as they say, like a pendulum do. Dylan’s version, by contrast, is haunted by the song’s obsessional, absolutist implications. He seems to naturally inhabit the underlying darkness in these songs, and recording them with his small combo, presumably in the manner of Shadows In The Night – live with no vocal booth, no headphones, and no overdubs – ensures that, unlike most modern-day punched-in vocal constructions, there’s a real sense of fallible humanity to these performances.

That’s most evident in “All The Way”, a song which proved so popular in Sinatra’s 1957 Oscar-winning original recording that the film from which it came, The Joker Is Wild, was subsequently re-titled after the song. Here, the way Dylan sings the title-phrase, it’s as if he’s reaching from some immense distance, exhausted by the effort. When he returns after the break, it’s touch and go whether he’ll hit the right key, but as with his live performances, it just adds to the quixotic charm. A similar enervated abjection applies to “Melancholy Mood”, where his delivery is less clipped than at last year’s Albert Hall show, more appropriate for the song’s enraptured spell, in which “whatever haunts me, steals upon me in the night, forever taunts me”. Although, if we’re considering lyrics unlikely to bear Dylan’s own writing credit, the line “Love is a whimsy as flimsy as lace” would surely come near the top of the list.

Another song profiting from his tone of weary disinterest is “Nevertheless”, where over a descending lilt built around Donny Herron’s pedal steel guitar and featuring a silky, restrained guitar break from Stu Kimball, Dylan sings as if all the lyrical quandaries of “maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong” have been sandblasted from his affection, leaving just the smooth certainty of love. Which just about compensates for his version’s lacking the crepuscular smokiness of Sinatra’s, or the blithe geniality of Bing Crosby’s.

The song here which most closely approaches both those characteristics is “Maybe You’ll Be There”, in which a lonely guy awaits the return of the love of his life. Dylan’s resignation, tempered with anticipation, is echoed by the brooding horns, which along with the violin, suggest the song may be an outtake from the Shadows In The Night sessions. By contrast, the enervation with which he delivers the closing “Come Rain Or Come Shine” over Kimball’s jazz guitar and Tony Garnier’s bowed bass makes his declaration of eternal company sound like more of a potential burden than a romantic promise. Certainly, it doesn’t challenge Ray Charles’ peerless reading as the definitive version.

Likewise, while his warm and gentle presentation of “Skylark”, over violin and Kimball’s nimble acoustic guitar, is one of the album’s most appealing interpretations, taken solely on its own merits, it clearly lacks both the easy familiarity and characteristic blues inflections of Hoagy Carmichael’s original, and the lush sweetness of Linda Ronstadt’s ’70s version. Carmichael, certainly, inserts the kind of uncertainty into the song which might have rendered it more congruent with the general mood of Fallen Angels.

As things are, it feels slightly out of place, along with “Young At Heart” – which admittedly, delivered as it is in Dylan’s elegant groan over a slow and weary steel guitar country arrangement, makes for a cute contrast with the song’s lyrical theme – and “That Old Black Magic”. The latter whisks lightly along in a souffle confection of Latin/country crossover, much faster than the rest of the album, with pedal steel employed as a background whine behind a neat, restrained guitar vamp and skittish rhythm. For once, Dylan sounds almost excited in his professed rapture. Though not excessively so: that would spoil the overall mood. It’s the only real misstep here, the result of an insurmountable contrast between theme – beguiled, mesmerised falling in love – and a tempo which favours feverish excitement over spellbound entrapment.

Andy Gill - May 23, 2016
UNCUT © Copyright Time Inc. (UK) Ltd.



There’s something reassuring about hearing Bob Dylan’s weathered voice, battered by over 50 years of recording and performing, crooning “and if you should survive to a hundred and five / look at all you’ll derive out of being alive / and here is the best part / you have a head start / if you are among the very young at heart”, in the opener to his latest covers album, Fallen Angels.

Dylan shows every intention of surviving until at least a hundred and five (hell, that’s 30 years from now, imagine how many great albums the man could put out during that span!), and he’s already derived more out of being alive than anybody could have imagined. Bob Dylan is a legend, the greatest songwriter in rock history, and if anybody has earned the right to ease into a warmly nostalgic set of well-worn classics it is he. Dylan’s not covering pop standards out of laziness, though, or because his own songwriting well has dried (he delivered the razor-sharp collection of originals, Tempest, only four years ago, and covers have always been a huge part of his repertoire). His fondness for these songs is obvious in the carefully crafted arrangements, the deep resonance of his vocals and the glowing charm his band wrings out of these old nuggets.

Fallen Angels is a companion of sorts to his last album Shadows in the Night, released barely a year ago. It is also a set of Dylan’s take on standards from the deep catalog of pop music history. He opened that album with a much darker vibe, a stunning take on “I’m a Fool to Want You”. Here, “Young at Heart” sets a lighter tone, which he more or less maintains throughout the album. Like its predecessor, all of the songs here (apart from the Johnny Mercer / Hoagy Carmichael gem “Skylark”), were at one time recorded by Frank Sinatra, but every one of them have been covered by a wide array of artists spanning decades.

Dylan offers a whimsical take on “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”, which, like much of the album, features gleaming lines of Donnie Herron’s steel guitar that shimmer like the moonbeams in the lyric. Like on Shadows in the Night, Dylan’s voice here is surprisingly supple given the ragged croak he often delivers live in concert. He instills sincerity and genuine feeling in the gently swaying “All the Way”, an Oscar winner in 1957 for writers Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn after Frank Sinatra recorded it for the film The Joker Is Wild.

“Nevertheless” dates all the way back to 1931 when Bing Crosby first recorded it, and dozens of musical luminaries have covered it since. Dylan’s take is a stately country slow-dance with a beautifully elegant guitar solo. “All Or Nothing at All” was a huge hit for Frank Sinatra in 1943, and Dylan’s reverent take on the 73-year-old track features one of his strongest vocals on the album, rich with feeling. He also takes a few lesser-known gems for a spin, like the jazzy little novelty “On a Little Street in Singapore”. Dylan’s voice is so closely mic’d that his ragged intakes of breath are clearly audible as he gamely tackles one of the album’s more robust vocal challenges.

Perhaps the weakest moment is “It Had to Be You”, which is a bit like drunken late-night karaoke with a band badly in need of a caffeine infusion. He makes up for it with a swinging take on “That Old Black Magic”, with the band finally unleashed from all the slow tunes and Dylan keeping up with their pep admirably. The album ends with the sentimental ballad, “Come Rain or Come Shine”, lovely and solemn.

It’s remarkable how cohesive Fallen Angels is as a listening experience considering that the material stretches decades. Dylan proves that these songs are still relevant and can still be deeply felt despite their age. It’s almost as if he’s intent on proving the eternal durability of a great song. Ultimately, that seems to be the point. For Bob Dylan, it’s obviously a labor of love, and for the most part he succeeds.

It’s not on the same level as Shadows in the Night, which is darker, more emotionally intense and an altogether more potent experience. At times Fallen Angels feels a bit lightweight in comparison. Still, it’s a touching tribute to Dylan’s continued passion for music, his love of performing and a celebration of some damn good songs.

Rating: 7/10

Chris Gerard - 20 May 2016
© 1999-2016 PopMatters.com



If you look at it from a certain perspective, it’s tempting to consider Bob Dylan’s career as little more than a series of caprices, impulses and perverse shifts in direction, designed as much to baffle and infuriate his listeners as entertain them. But that would be a mistake and a terrible misreading of what’s driven Mr. Dylan for the past 50 years or so.

Certainly, Bob Dylan has taken risks that may have seemed ill-advised at the time, but right from the very beginning, his ‘Judas’-like betrayals have been made in the name of expanding what’s possible and extending vocabulary, both lyrical and musical, and not as a way of attracting attention. When he first “went electric” in 1965, lots of people hated it, stamped their feet and wanted him to strap on his Woody Guthrie working man’s guitar and unplug again. But we all know that time does funny things, and when “Like A Rolling Stone” was voted the No. 1 rock song of all time by Rolling Stone, no one complained about the funky organ or the jangling guitars.

It’s been a familiar pattern in Dylan’s work. His first work to be released after being sidelined by a motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966 was the bucolic, stripped-down John Wesley Harding. When it came out in 1967, psychedelic music was in full swing and Dylan’s album of folk rambles and simple parables vied for space on record store racks with Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love and Cream’s Wheels Of Fire. By the time the rest of the world had caught up with him musically, Dylan had already moved a long way on down the road.

Perhaps it’s because Dylan came so strongly onto the scene as a very young man that he was typecast so early and so easily. It’s something Dylan has clearly struggled with, but even when he has purposely recorded music designed to confuse his audience—as he claimed to do with Self-Portrait, his first album of cover songs from 1970—the passage of time has often been all that was needed to change people’s perspectives. The release of the archival set Another Self-Portrait from a few years ago, in which many of the recordings were stripped of their string arrangements gave the music a whole new context and a subsequent reappraisal of a long-dismissed album that surprised many people.

It’s a familiar theme that has been repeated over and over again. Dylan’s Christian albums that were castigated for so long have also received a lot of sympathetic reassessments in recent years. Listened to with fresh ears, Slow Train Coming is certainly one of the most intense, beautifully written and performed gospel records ever recorded. Take a listen through it if you haven’t heard it recently; it is jaw-dropping in its power and perfection.

More closely related to the release of Shadows In The Night and Fallen Angels perhaps are Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, Dylan’s two albums of blues and folk covers from the early ‘90s. On those records, he shared versions of some of his favorite traditional songs that he grew up with. When the first album, Good As I Been To You, was announced as an “intimate acoustic” record, people were very excited and expected a return to form, but when faced with the raw and challenging nature of the songs he sung, many shied away from the intensity. The next record, World Gone Wrong, with songs like “Blood In My Eyes,” was darker and edgier still, and left many of Dylan’s fans wondering why he had to push even further into such antiquated directions. It’s a much better record than Good As I Been To You because of the ease and looseness of the recordings.

A similar dynamic is at play with Fallen Angels when compared to Shadows In The Night. Dylan has been singing cover songs during his concerts for many years now, and Sinatra tunes like “Lucky Old Sun” have made appearances from time to time, so none of his old fans were very surprised when Shadows In The Night was announced. It did quite well in the press, but most of the coverage relied on expounding about the novelty aspect of the project and the absurdity of a guy with a voice like Dylan’s taking on such silken, sophisticated material. Still, at this stage of the game, the press was indulgent towards whatever the “old master” wanted to sing, but underlying this indulgence there was a subtext that urged people not to worry and that this was just a one-off. You know, “one Sinatra covers record, fine, but why, oh why, make a second one? Are you trying to kill us? Only someone with a voice like Michael Buble should venture into this territory.”

Personally, I’m glad he didn’t listen to voices like that—not that he ever has listened to anyone’s advice. To start with, the arrangements on Fallen Angels are wonderful and sumptuous. Recorded with his longtime touring band, it’s easy to hear how working with this music has breathed new life into them as a performing unit. Their playing is loose, easy and natural, and they sound like they’re having a lot of fun. Special mention should be made of Tony Garnier’s warm and full bass playing as well as Donnie Herron’s lush pedal and lap steel textures.

For his part, Dylan continues to sing with a precision and fluidity that he doesn’t always bring to bear. If anything, his approach is looser and more confident than on the performances in Shadows In The Night. He takes on each song with complete sincerity and when it works, he remains a great—if somewhat ragged—singer and interpreter of the emotions suggested by each work. What Dylan does with his voice is obviously different than what Sinatra set out to do with his, but their perspectives are equally interesting. Sinatra was silk and sophistication, making the hurts expressed by the narrator of his songs an error, a mistake of outrageous fortune. Singing the same lyrics, Dylan’s the down-and-out guy looking for an even break; victory would be a greater surprise than all the shit that’s raining down on him. Given all the bad luck the guy is singing about, we’re not surprised when he occasionally slides off-key. He doesn’t have Sinatra’s walls of polish and protection. They sing the same songs, but the outcomes are different. The stories that shimmer and glide between phrases, suggested in the pauses, are what makes them so compelling. Listen to Dylan sing “Melancholy Mood” and you’ll never ask “how low can you go?” ever again. Yeah, Dylan sings the same songs, but the outcomes, the suggestions are from a different universe than the one Sinatra sang from.

When you listen to “Young At Heart,” my favorite cut from Fallen Angels, don’t ask yourself if Dylan’s interpretations sound as good as Sinatra’s, or worse still how they’ll stack up against “Blowin’ In The Wind” or “Like A Rolling Stone.” You’ll drive yourself crazy if you do. This is music that should be enjoyed on its own terms.

In the end, Bob Dylan has nothing to prove. Fallen Angels is his 37th studio album, so in many ways this is just one more. No big deal. Dylan has written and recorded thousands of songs of his own, and putting out these ones isn’t going to make Bringing It All Back Home or Blood On The Tracks any less significant.

I understand why Dylan wanted to explore these songs: They hold a key. They represent and explore emotional landscapes that we don’t encounter much anymore. In a world before therapy, Oprah and Dr. Phil, there was nothing to do when your heart was breaking but gather your manly resolve and carry on. These are songs where the singer wakes up to find himself on the other end of the world, missing home and unable to write the letter or make the phone call to say the worlds that could change something. Like the 1945 Otto Preminger film that Fallen Angels paraphrases its title from, Dylan’s latest is a noir journey through a world of guns, dames, rainy streets and crippling regret. But, more than all of that, Fallen Angels is still a hell of an enjoyable album to listen to, and one that I’m sure will be appreciated far more with the passage of time.

Douglas Heselgrave - May 20, 2016
© 2016 Paste Media



You can go all the way back to the beginning of “What the fuck 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.

Winston Cook-Wilson - May 23 2016
Pitchfork.com



At 75, Bob Dylan is turning black-and-white. The mysterious nature of his latest albums, their stark artwork and the lighting and composition of his most recent TV appearances possess many hallmarks of film noir classics, where things aren't always what they seem. These seem to resonate with Dylan because, though of a bygone era, their insights into human nature hold up.

The time travel continues. Fallen Angels is a companion piece and continuation of 2015's Shadows In The Night, in which Dylan reinterprets pop standards that Frank Sinatra made his own. A problematically manly man, Sinatra was a twinkle-eyed charmer, a smooth and reckless lady-killer, a domineering boss, an abusive alcoholic and an iconic alpha to the end. He was about as flawed a hero as America has ever celebrated.

Here, Dylan does some celestial rendering of Sinatra songs. Recording in the same Capitol Studios, pondering Sinatra's versions ahead of his own takes, Dylan and his band capture a compelling tension between the sunny and dark aspects of love songs.

The Hoagy Carmichael-influenced jazz and blues tones of his recent original material are applied seamlessly, pedal steel and violin voicing the familiar orchestral progressions on mesmerizing songs like Maybe You'll Be There and Skylark, which isn't really known as a Sinatra cover.

Indeed, paying homage to both a formidable figure and a musical form, Dylan highlights the art of crooning, commanding the prettiest version of his multi-faceted, distinctive voice. This album is not a trifle; in some instances, these might well be newly definitive recordings of the songs.

Fallen Angels is a hazy, laid-back history lesson with as many enigmatic twists and turns as a classic double-cross caper. It subverts archetypes of romance, heroism and interpersonal connection to reveal something more sinister about human intent, all packaged in beautiful musicianship of the highest order.

Vish Khanna - May 18, 2016
NOW Communications



Fallen Angels is the thirty-seventh studio album by Bob Dylan, released by Columbia Records on May 20, 2016. The album features covers of twelve classic American songs chosen by Dylan from a diverse array of writers such as Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn and Carolyn Leigh. Much like the album's predecessor, Shadows in the Night, every song on the album, except for "Skylark", was once recorded by Frank Sinatra. The album has received generally favorable reviews from critics, with particular praise for Dylan's vocal performance, production quality, and the arrangements of his band.

Fallen Angels was recorded in 2015 at Capitol Studios in Hollywood, with his touring band and was released by Columbia Records on May 20, 2016. Prior to release, on April 7, 2016, the song "Melancholy Mood" was made available on iTunes as an Instant Gratification track, and via streaming on YouTube. On April 28, 2016, the day Dylan concluded a tour of Japan, a second track from the album, "All the Way", became available to download from iTunes and stream on YouTube. In promotion for the release, Dylan released a 7" EP on April 16, 2016, titled Melancholy Mood, and limited to 7000 copies.

Fallen Angels has received mostly positive reviews from critics thus far. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album currently holds an average score of 77, which indicates "generally favorable reviews", based on 21 reviews.

Particular praise has been heaped on the band arrangements, production, and Dylan's voice. In a four-star review, Andy Gill of The Independent wrote, "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". Likewise, Jim Farber of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "Dylan alights on these words [the lyrics] with a wry delicacy. His voice may be husky and damaged from decades of performing, but there’s beauty to its character. Tellingly, he delivers these songs of love lost and cherished not with a burning passion but with the wistfulness of experience." Helen Brown in her five-star review for The Telegraph also praised Dylan's vocal abilities on the album, stating, "Although some people have always maintained that Dylan “can’t sing”, the truth is that — like Sinatra — he’s always had a knockout knack for putting a lyric across...Now he inhabits classic lines by songwriters like Johnny Mercer with weathered ease."

Vish Khanna of Now Magazine also praised the album, in a five-star review, writing, "Fallen Angels is a hazy, laid-back history lesson with as many enigmatic twists and turns as a classic double-cross caper. It subverts archetypes of romance, heroism and interpersonal connection to reveal something more sinister about human intent, all packaged in beautiful musicianship of the highest order."

In relation to the idea of Dylan covering songs from the Great American Songbook, Mat Snow of Mojo Magazine writes in a four-star review:
What Dylan gives us in these recordings is something of a sentimental memoir...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...with seemingly nothing in common with his thrillingly modern yet deep-rooted songs two decades later...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.
Also praising the concept behind Fallen Angels and its predecessor, Shadows in the Night, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic stated:
These wise, wily interpretations underscore Dylan's ultimate aim with these Sinatra records, which is to slyly tie together various strands of American music, bringing Tin Pan Alley to the barrooms and taking the backwoods uptown. The results are understated yet extraordinary, an idiosyncratic, romantic vision of 20th century America.
Jon M. Gilbertson, in a review from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, opines, "Fallen Angels, like last year's Shadows in the Night, teases out threads of Sinatra sentimentality — Frank recorded nearly all the songs on both discs — and winds them around a voice that is desiccated in tone and tune but, in phrasing and emotion, can still find romantic blossoms among the painful thorns." Likewise, Andy Gill of Uncut Magazine, in a positive review of 8 stars out of 10, also related the album to Shadows in the Night, feeling that "Dylan has continued to restrict his choice to those songs which conform loosely to a mood of weary resignation, extending the engaging crepuscular mood of Shadows in the Night."

However, Chris Gerard, writing for PopMatters, felt that the album did not quite live up to the standard set by Dylan's previous Great American Songbook project, Shadows in the Night, stating, in an otherwise positive review, "It’s not on the same level as Shadows in the Night, which is darker, more emotionally intense and an altogether more potent experience. At times Fallen Angels feels a bit lightweight in comparison. Still, it’s a touching tribute to Dylan’s continued passion for music, his love of performing and a celebration of some damn good songs."

wikipedia.org



Mit Fallen Angels veröffentlicht Bob Dylan ein Album mit zwölf klassischen, amerikanischen Songs, die von einigen der legendärsten und einflussreichsten Songwritern der Musikgeschichte stammen. Es ist das Follow-Up zum 2015er Album Shadows In The Night , das in siebzehn Ländern die Top Ten erreichte, darunter Deutschland (Platz sechs), USA (Platz sieben) und Großbritannien (Platz eins).

Der von Jack Frost produzierte Longplayer ist das 37. Studioalbum in Dylans Karriere. Für Fallen Angels wählte Dylan u.a. Lieder von Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn und Carolyn Leigh, darunter Evergreens wie It Had To Be You und Young At Heart . Die Aufnahmen fanden 2015 zusammen mit seiner Tourband in den Capitol Studios in Hollywood statt.

Amazon.de



Bob Dylan dreht Musik anderer Leute von Hand im Grabe um: Sein neues Album „Fallen Angels“ erscheint zu seinem 75. Geburtstag, stolpert und fällt am Ende auf sich selbst herein.

Höre und staune, so kann man das Hochgefühlspanoramadrama „It had to be you“ also auch interpretieren: als Torkelschwof für die volltrunkene letzte Phase bei der Engtanzparty, wenn die Leute nur noch sachte widereinander schwanken, Tannenwipfel im Abendhauch. Der kleinste, feinste Schlagzeugbesen beschmiert in geduldiger Streichbewegung das zarte Filetstück des ewigschönen Liedes mit dem flüssigen Eigelb klebriger Sentimentalität, dann darf ein wehmütiges, uraltes Krokodil die Bescherung mit den Seelenbröseln seiner Tabakkrümelstimme bestreuseln, Ladies and Gentlemen, Bob Dylan: „might never be cross, or try to be boss“ – so also nimmt er Frank Sinatra jetzt ein Wort aus dem Mund, das er selbst schon hübscher gesungen hat, nämlich als „All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.“

Hören Sie das? Diese komplett geheimnislose, völlig mit sich selbst einige Gitarre, nach deren sauberem Sound Lou Reed vor „New York“ (1989) zwanzig Jahre lang erfolglos suchen musste? Der Arrangeur Bob Dylan hat sie jetzt wiedergefunden; sie lag unterm Waschbecken, in einer Wanne mit abgestandenem Geschirrspülmittel. Geistloser kann Sauberkeit nicht klingen.

Dylan, der große Musiker, berühmte Dichter und Zeuge eines amerikanischen Jahrhunderts, sitzt also zum wiederholten Mal hoch auf dem Golden Oldie und erklärt des Kaisers olle Klamotten (lies: Kamellen) zur Frühjahrskollektion seiner traditionsreichen Maßschneiderei. Widerstand ist herzlos: Alles schnippt mit den Fingern, wenn auf „On a Little Street in Singapore“ ein molliges Nostalgiefeuerchen im Kamin eines gemütlichen Wimmerzimmers unter leise jaulender Zupfdudelbegleitung vor sich hin knistert und die Nummer dann plötzlich so abrupt aufhört, als würde ein Liebesroman mit dem Satz beendet: „Und dann kriegen sie einander halt.“
Nicht jeder Genuss verträgt Publikum

Die Platte, auf der dies geschieht und die man von heute an kaufen kann, heißt beziehungsreich „Fallen Angels“. Nicht alles darauf ist so deprimierend schlecht wie das Geschilderte. „That Old Black Magic“ zum Beispiel federt flott wie ein Schwärmchen Angry Birds; die Idee, das Wort „Kiss“ mit einem furchtlosen Kick zu bekräftigen, ist grob und platt, also ein tüchtiger Hit. Umso schlimmer spukt der Rest, am schlimmsten die Eröffnung mit „Young at Heart“, vorgeknödelt im Gestus „Mir doch egal, wie das Ding geht, ich bin, wie ich bin“, eine Verwechslung von Gehabe mit Kunst, die als Auftakt für einen Rundgang durch Archivbestände wirkt, als würde sich jemand mit ironischem Augenzwinkern als der neunte der sieben Zwerge vorstellen.

Ist ihm so langweilig? Langweilig war ihm ja immer wieder. Aber dann hat er im besten Fall sich selbst, andere oder seine Instrumente dafür eben büßen lassen (akustische Gitarre? Nichts da. Stimme einer Generation? Von wegen. Lieder mit kritischem Dings? Ihr könnt mich mal), und alle hatten was von der Kurskorrektur. Und jetzt? Ein Hain von unfruchtbaren, spät gepflanzten Apfelbäumchen mit wächsern glänzenden Plastikfrüchten dran. Alte Männer, ohne die der Planet Musik ein anderer wäre, sollen ihren Lebensabend genießen dürfen wie jedes andere Tierchen. Aber nicht jeder Genuss braucht und verträgt Publikum, und wenn Bob Dylan beim Häuten der Zimbel seine Jugenderinnerungen wiederfindet, ist das nur für verrentete Kulturstaatsministerialbeamte automatisch interessanter als, sagen wir: revanchistischer Schlagerschmutz, der gerade den Eurovisionswettbewerb gewonnen hat.

Dietmar Dath - 20.05.2016
© 2001-2016 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
 

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