Categories : Country + Western, Music Reviews.
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Rating: 3 / 5 Reviewer: Michelle Kennedy |
As summer approaches we begin to look for that perfect warm-weather album; that perfect torch song for late nights around the campfire; that perfect album for the heartbreak that’s sure to follow a whimsical summer fling – Jakob Dylan’s Women and Country has the potential to be all those things and yet somehow falls short on most accounts.
The short-falling is this – it’s a competent, clean and well-made record and not much else. It opens with a song easy to sing along to (‘Nothing But the Whole Wide World’), and closes with an equally simple and catchy song guaranteed to stick with you after you turn off the stereo (‘Standing Eight Count’). Recent Oscar winner T-Bone Burnett’s production is clean when it wants to be and messy when it feels right, and Dylan’s gentle voice shines through it all like a beacon of… adequacy. There is nothing essentially bad about this album it just isn’t special. The big city cowboy songs (‘Everybody’s Hurting’) and faux-sad phrasing (‘Smile When You Call Me That’) make this album feel trite and contrived and more of a tribute to Dylan’s influences than a genuine creative force majeure. He channels Daddy Dylan, Tom Waits, Tom Petty and Townes Van Zandt with ease but never quite reaches the deeply affecting heights they achieved.
The real beauty of this album lies in the addition of Neko Case and band-mate Kelly Hogan. Their voices ring through the average and deliver on the honest promises of country music: simple, heartfelt and deeply honest.
