Bob Dylan -Tempest2012

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Tempest is Dylan’s 35th^th (sic) studio album as they say, and what a beauty. The thrill is in hearing such a cross-sectional hodgepodgian mishmash of eclectic ways to say ‘Dylanesque pastiche.’ Like the surface of the earth, he’s all over the place—congo bongo, Django jazz, Flying Nun jangle, Northern soul, Canadian punk, gypsy rag, Scottish reel, Xenakisian electronica, gumbo dirge, Elvis-impersonator, beatnik poetry, Delta reggaetron, Hindi laptop, K-pop thrash, J-skronk, avante acoustic field, and an endless helping of Dylan’s take on Tuvan throat-singing. What may come as a relief to many fans, is that there’s no 12 bar blues here. It seems he’s gone all out to bring it all back home. Amen to that.

A ‘tempest’ is a violent windy storm, and you can well imagine all the musics of the world inside one of these things, spinning wildly around (like a broken record), Dylan flinging his mind at the walls of his sanity to break himself open and bleed out fifty years of the hell of an unwanted celebrity. It’s the chaos within which we are all somewhere mirrored—the dissolution of subjectivity into the true multiplicity of identity, like the event horizon of a black hole, the singularity sucking all musical and lyrical matter of the universe into its great intertextual weave, but which must acknowledge the evacuation of any notion of ‘soul.’ Rumour has it that Dylan has not been seen since the recording finished. Meanwhile a 75 year old imposture formerly known as ‘Regimond Barclay’ has  stepped into Dylan’s shoes for future concert appearances, photo-shoots, random sightings and radio shows…

One interesting thing: the track-listing on the back of the record splits the songs differently to how they are actually played out (the labels are correct). One hopes this misprint will make my early review copy worth a fortune one day. I’ve only listened to this twice through so far, so I’ll refrain from any serious lyric interpretation. There’s a lot to sink in any new Dylan album. Two listens is only 1/20th of the way there. Anyhow, in the manner of your usual Bumstead review, let the real-time commentary begin…

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