What happened to Bob Dylan? When he began his musical career he could make magic with just an acoustic guitar, a harmonica and his lyrics. His latest album, "Modern Times," barely shows a trace of Dylan's old magic.
If "Modern Times" is how Dylan is sounding nowadays, perhaps he should have retired a while ago and never continued into modern times. This album is a disappointment and shows the deterioration of his songwriting more than it shows any perpetuation of his musical legacy. His musical style has changed - a couple of the songs on the album sound like bad lounge music, - but the worst parts of the album are the disjointed, sometimes meaningless lyrics and senseless rhyming in most of the songs.
Two of the tracks at the beginning of the album, "Thunder on the Mountain" and "Rollin' and Tumblin'," have structures without strong choruses. The structures beg for the lyrics to carry the songs, but the lyrics fail badly. The lyrics in "Thunder on the Mountain" are well written if you consider them line by line, but the lines don't relate to each other in any cohesive pattern.
The song has no unifying theme. Some of the lyrics seem to be added only because they rhyme with the preceding line. Dylan sings, "I've been sittin' down studying the art of love / I think it'll fit me like a glove.
" These kinds of lyrics dominate the album. It's not clear what Dylan is singing about on most of the tracks. It just sounds like nonsense.
"Spirit on the Water" and "Beyond the Horizon" are the two tracks that sound like lounge music, and they are bad lounge music. Both songs have a vague love theme with poetic, meaningless words and no clear choruses. The verses in "Spirit on the Water" are weak and unrelated.
Dylan sings, "They brag about your sugar / They brag about it all over town / put some sugar in my bowl / I feel like laying down." The following verse is unrelated and does nothing to clarify what Dylan means by "laying down.
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