Categories : Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Top Rated.
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Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
Jakob Dylan must have balls the size of grapefruits. After all, it’s one thing to put out an acoustic folk album of political songs, but it’s another thing altogether when you come from a certain bloodline. It would be cynical – and frankly, way too easy – to say that Dylan is trying to profit off of his last name. After all, if that were true, why would he wait until he was nearly 40 to play this particular hand, and spend most of his formative songwriting years as leader of his unassuming band, The Wallflowers?
Dylan’s turn as a folk singer is utterly successful, though vocally he’d be more likely to draw comparisons to Bruce Springsteen if he had a different last name. Even though the songs are stripped down to their bones, the album builds and sustains a definite momentum. Opener ‘Evil is Alive and Well’ and ‘Everybody Pays As They Go’ are particular benchmarks, but the crux of the album is the gripping ‘War is Kind,’ which imagines a series of letters written by a soldier and displays Dylan’s deft emotional misleads: ‘Daughter, war is safe / where you are, far away.’ But like any good protester, not all is negative – ‘Something Good This Way Comes’ is a reminder that even in war, it’s okay to take joy in some sweet apple pie.
There are moments that could be better here – the song structures and melodies aren’t the most inventive. But Seeing Things has a certain timeless quality to it that makes it feel like more than the sum of its parts, and more than a record by Bob Dylan’s son.
