Dylan, Like The Beams Of A Balance, Is Always Varying

I had an absolute blast writing this review.  The gig was such great fun (I think Bob was having more fun than everyone), and whilst 20% of the time I was laughing at some clunker of a wrong note or something, the other 80% of the time I was giggling with joy at the playfulness of it all.  Sincerely, every old rocker's gigs should be like this, hats resolutely off. to the man.

Archivists can note that I don't actually know who the promoter was; there wwre probably about 17 involved.  Hats off to the PR person for getting a brace of guest passes for little old Nutshaft, though, that was brilliant.

BOB DYLAN, NEW THEATRE, 4/11/22

The crowd pouring out of The New Theatre seemed to be split on whether this was a good or bad gig. Certainly it was gloriously odd. That Bob elected to play piano throughout was eyebrow-raising, but that he sat at a rickety old upright heroically out of tune with the backing quintet was a free temporary facelift. Even weirder, the nearest mic to the piano appeared to be 6-feet away, leading to a fuzzy, sub-aquatic mix straight from a David Lynch soundtrack (anyone who thought they’d been dreaming when they saw the gig announced might suspect they’d never woken up). And Bob did nothing to dispel the unreality, striking the ivories with authoritative spareness like Thelonious Monk via Les Dawson, and keeping the band on their collective toes with odd rhythms. Songs from the last album were played relatively straight – although they already sound like beautiful half-forgotten ghosts of drawing room ballads – but old tracks bore almost no resemblance to the original composition: they played “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” like they’ve never heard it before, and “Gotta Serve Somebody” like they’ve never heard any song ever, words crammed into an ill-fitting melody like a Nightshift writer trying to fit into their teenage jeans. These are not cock-ups, but deliberate playful decisions, risks that are entertaining regardless of whether they pay off.

 Received opinion is that Dylan’s voice is a batrachian croak for which the concept of individual notes is a faded memory. Certainly, for much of 1992’s Good As I Been To You he sounds as though he’s actually dying in the vocal booth (and then come back as a tipsy zombie for 2009’s inexplicable Christmas In The Heart), but after a decade of studying the urbane stylings of Sinatra, his voice has become a warm, avuncular buzz somewhere between Bing Crosby, Tom Waits, and Vincent Price. His singing tonight is sweet and melodic, and even if the mudpie mix means we catch maybe 10% of the words, his timing is impeccable, by turns dramatic and hilarious. Wayward phrasing is his super-power; maybe he was bitten by some radioactive rubato in Greenwich Village.

It’s a joy to see an elder statesman onstage who neither plays everything fixed-grin safe, nor cynically runs out the clock with half an eye on their bank balance. If this were a Dylan tribute, you’d bottle them offstage; if this were a new act, you’d be raiding their Bandcamp on the bus home. Fixing any of the oddities would have made this a better gig. But being a better gig would have made this a much worse gig.  

 

 

Piece of Bis

OK, I've decided that what I'll do is post my MusicOMH reviews one in arrears.  This means there will be an average of 4 weeks between posting on their site and here - but go and sign up for the site if you want them more quickly.  Here's a fun little album from some pop kids who probably now have their own kids.

BIS – SYSTEMS MUSIC FOR HOME DEFENCE (Last Night From Glasgow)

Pop music is synonymous with youth, of course, but nobody can stop time. The public is generally happy to see their favourite artists slip into middle age so long as they can still turn out a tune, happy to forego low hairlines and narrow waists, and everyone just pretends that jumping over the drum riser or busting out a slutdrop was never a big deal in the first place. But when an act celebrates their juvenility from the outset, aging becomes a harsher curse. Musical Youth might turn in a decent festival set, but there’ll still be a little cognitive dissonance you won’t get with UB40 and anyone who’s encountered The Nashville Teens on the nostalgia trail can only find their senescence risible. Sonic Youth were perhaps ironic enough to carry it off, but seeing their craggy, lined faces in their final years as a band still. And Neil Young is just taking the piss.

Bis have managed to walk that tightrope rather nicely. Yes, they may not all have been old enough to buy a pint when they first appeared on Top Of The Pops – the first unsigned act ever to do so, an achievement which puts them into both the record books and  the roster of classic pub quiz questions – but, despite the odd lyric about sweetshops or Teen-C power, their feeling of youthful effusiveness came from their fierce independence and love of euphoric pop music rather than any post-adolescent energy. And this has not changed on their sixth studio album, the same infectious bounce and sly wit is in evidence as it was back in 1996; they just go easier on the hairclips nowadays.

Some of the lyrics do reflect a more middle-aged mindset, where mortgages and school runs might take place of rollerblades and school discos. Headaches and Stress are not exactly titles one would have found on a 90s Bis album. Even when the themes are somewhat more universal, the band reveal that they’re in their forties: lead single Lucky Night is a grinning swipe at men who co-opt feminism as an item in their chat-up arsenal (“Patriarchy is a bad scene/ Baby, I’m the vaccine”), but it’s hard to imagine any bar-room lothario under 35 asking for someone’s email address.

The music still packs a sherbety punch, though, regardless of the topics covered, embellishing the fizzy, buzzing indie-pop of old with some sonic references which actually predate the band’s first recordings by 7 or 8 years. Stress is an indie anthem with Walken-tickling levels of cowbell, but also has a vintage rave breakdown, and some perky backing vocals from Manda Rin that sound pleasingly like Betty Boo. (I Got My) Independence – a track title to sum up the Bis ethos in every decade, perhaps – starts with some pounding Italo house piano, before morphing into a, Express Yourself-era Madonna tune via some crisp 909 snare. Lucky Night’s package holiday party sound is like something from the second-tier of Stock, Aitken & Waterman’s roster – think Sonia or The Reynolds Girls – and We Do Structures might have a name like an ancient po-faced Numan B-side, but has a winking hi-NRG rhythm with more in common with London Boys. There’s even a track entitled The Lookback, pledging that “we do the lookback to see where we’ve come from”, in case there was any doubt (and, for the record, the lush synth pads this time nod towards the Madonna of Vogue, with a hint of The Beloved’s melancholy 3AM wistfulness).

The sounds of 1989 are big business currently, and a band like the superb Confidence Man can take some vintage chart pop and some juicy Chicago house basslines to create a night at the Platonic NYC gay club of your dreams, but on Systems Music For Home Defence, Bis bring the same pleasures down to earth. Instead of big budget fantasies the album sound more like someone playing along to favourite pop tunes through fuzzy amps and singing with equal zest and wonky pitching into a marker pen microphone. And if that doesn’t sound like fun to you, you’re probably too old.