At 79, Bob Dylan releases his album No 39: it’s a triumph

The 79 year-old singer-songwriter shows an awareness of his own mortality and vulnerability, baring his soul like rarely before.

Bob Dylan in 2012. Picture: Fred Tanneau/AFP

ROOTS/FOLK

Rough and Rowdy Ways

Bob Dylan

Columbia/Sony

★★★★

Rough and Rowdy Ways, by Bob Dylan.

For nigh-on 60 years, the reluctant prophet has profited from the mystique that has surrounded his public persona and given him licence, during the past decade, for indulgences such as a Christmas album and a triple tilt at the Great American Songbook.

With his first set of original material since 2012’s Tempest, Bob Dylan redresses the ledger to a large degree. Like most of his 39 studio albums, the intriguing Rough and Rowdy Ways will reward multiple visits. Awash with paradoxical and self-effacing prose, haunting imagery, droll humour and erudition, it’s guaranteed to generate debate.

The album already has spawned a controversial first pop-chart No 1 for Dylan in the epic Murder Most Foul. While it may not be the masterpiece that myopic fans claim, this sparsely instrumented 17-minute quasi-poem, which sashays from an account of John Kennedy’s assassination into a name-checking assemblage of 20th-century culture, encompasses some compelling wordplay. Though much shorter and stylistically more conventional, the other advance releases are similarly trance-inducing.

Dylan continues his rollcall literately in the excellent I Contain Multitudes, dropping names such as Anne Frank and William Blake while fessing up to being “a man of contradictions, a man of many moods”.

In the even more autobiographical False Prophet, the old groaner oozes blues cred as he growls: “I’m the enemy of treason, enemy of strife / I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life.” In another 12-bar construct, he feels “the bones beneath my skin” before taking his bearings “between heaven and earth” and crossing the titular Rubicon. A genuflection to Mississippi bluesman Jimmy Reed rides on a more upbeat rhythm.

In an interesting juxtaposition, Dylan sandwiches a delightful love ballad between the set’s most dystopian songs. In his discourses on deceased players, poets and presidents, he shows an awareness of his own mortality and vulnerability, baring his soul like rarely before.

At 79, he has consolidated his place in the pantheon of all-time greats.

Tony Hillier

Making A Door Less Open, by Car Seat Headrest.

INDIE ROCK

Making a Door Less Open

Car Seat Headrest

Matador/Remote Control

★★★★

US act Car Seat Headrest became an overnight sensation with 2016’s Teens of Denial — all it took was 10 albums and a half-decade dedicated to prolific Bandcamp releases. It may seem like an unusual path to indie stardom, but you have to take into consideration that nothing about this band fits within the norm. Making a Door Less Open, naturally, is no different. It’s not for nothing that opener Weightlifters comes across as a Beck pastiche — he and CSH frontman Will Toledo possess a similar artistic fearlessness, touching the furthest reaches of their musical spectrums while still remaining idiosyncratic by design. Later on, Hollywood revels in its volatile vocal delivery and snarling Sonics-aping riff, while What’s With You Lately contains a solitary acoustic guitar. Wherever Toledo takes CSH next, you’re inclined to go with him.

David James Young

Alexandra, by Andrew Tuttle.

EXPERIMENTAL

Alexandra

Andrew Tuttle

Room40

★★★★

Andrew Tuttle’s ruminative fourth album takes its name from Brisbane suburb Alexandra Hills, where Tuttle spent his childhood. Yet the absence of lyrics in his purely instrumental work means that nostalgia and a strong sense of place are conveyed instead through chiming banjo, poignant fingerpicked guitar and site-specific song titles such as Scribbly Gums Trail. Tuttle continues to mingle Americana-leaning instrumentation with subtle electronic ambience and effects, but this time he corrals a handful of guests to flesh out his creations even further. Chuck Johnson’s disembodied pedal steel guitar lingers like a ghostly sunset across Tallowwood View, while Joel Saunders’s perky trumpet lines add a celebratory kick to Platypus Corridor. Whether you see this as blissful background music or front-and-centre transcendence, there’s no denying its warmth.

Doug Wallen

12 Songs from Home, by Ludovico Einaudi.

CLASSICAL

Twelve Songs from Home

Ludovico Einaudi

Decca

★★★★

Across these desolate months, I find myself taking solace in solo keyboard music by Bach, Satie and Arvo Part. To that company, I now add the contemporary Italian composer-pianist Ludovico Einaudi. No longer able to tour or perform in public, in March he took to recording music on his iPhone playing his out-of-tune upright piano. These 12 tracks stand as a kind of testament and balm for the age. There is something affectionate and immediate in this music, shorn of the histrionic virtuosity and electronic wizardry of the concert hall. Some of these tracks aficionados will recognise from earlier albums and concert tours, but here they have been pared back to the bare doodlings of a composer’s private first thoughts at his home keyboard. After 75 minutes of these simple miniatures, the mind feels comforted and restored.

Vincent Plush

Grae, by Moses Sumney.

R&B/POP

Grae

Moses Sumney

Jagjaguwar/Inertia

★★★½

This pared back, bluesy vehicle for North Carolina native Moses Sumney’s butter-rich voice is a balm for troubled minds and troubled times. The sweep of fingers over piano keys sounds like sunlight on dusty floorboards, while the jazzy trumpet and subtle percussion of Cut Me sidles up to ballad In Bloom. Both are studies in subtlety compared with the jittery percussion, echoing keyboards and rich, falsetto spiked harmonies of Virile. The instrumental excursions into atmospheric sounds continue in wild, wonderful directions across these 20 tracks. Gagarin is lush, spacious jazz, while Sumney channels Bjork and Janelle Monae in his adventurousness and androgyny. Skewing soul, jazz, trip-hop and R&B, he travels a similar route to Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke and Frank Ocean in establishing that men can be strong, self-reliant, candid and virile while making vulnerable music.

Cat Woods

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Playlist: John Brewster, guitarist, The Angels

Five songs on high rotation

01. A Whiter Shade of Pale Procol Harum

This song defines the 1960s more than any other from that period — a combination of great music with interesting lyrics.

02. Like a Rolling Stone Bob Dylan

From solo acoustic guitar, the artist all the folkies took as their own, to hard-edge rock in a glorious and uplifting way.

03. I’ll Be Gone Spectrum

This song takes me back to our earliest gigs, and the lyric represents the way all us young musicians thought at the time.

04. It’s a Long Way to the Top AC/DC

Incredible feel, and a great combination of their Scottish roots joining forces with the best rock band in the world.

05. A Day in the Life The Beatles

A Lennon-McCartney masterpiece.