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This is one of Bob Dylan's greatest musical outings. His efforts in the last few years that have been proclaimed as classics are fine works. There is a magical timelessness conjured in the words of those records. The songs on "Love and Theft" evoke a world that could have existed at almost any time.
Few of them provide any laughs, though.
The era evoked on "Together Through Life," while not strikingly contemporary, sounds much closer at hand. In the song "If You Ever Go to Houston," we hear that the narrator almost died in Houston in the Mexican War, and we are offered the advice that we'd best have our gun-belts on tight if we ever visit that no-nonsense Lone-star town. The guy singing the song, one feels, died awhile back. But he didn't predate the founding of Houston.
All of the lyrics to the songs, except for "This Dream of You," were co written with Robert Hunter, and it is likely this collaboration helped lighten the mood. ("This Dream of You" is captivating & its music is haunting-- but it is on the sadder side of wistful.)
Another reviewer at Amazon noted that academics inclined to do so probably won't get too excited at "Together Through Life"'s lyrics. The words strike few ponderous, evasive, or menacing notes. But they're pretty good.
Some samples:
"In a cheerless room from a curtain gloom, I saw a star from heaven fall, I turned to look again, but it was gone."
"There's a moment when all old things become new again, but that moment might have come and gone,"
"The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there ever was a door."
How much better does Bob Dylan get? To me Bob Dylan's music gets more and more entertaining as time goes on.
I see the album as a concept album. The concept is that he's sung about Jesus, God,and the quest for the eternal through this world of folly and woe-- but people don't enjoy hearing about that stuff as much as they do the hard-knocks, bruises, and heartbreaks of this world. So, in this record he delivers a collection of tunes that people can tap their feet to and jump around and be merry as he celebrates people's brightest worldly hope and object of admiration-- romantic love. The kind that brings the world suddenly alive, or makes one long to end it all in a moment. And even some of the best love, it turns out, can be good for a laugh. The album opens with "Beyond Here Lies Nothing" (our love is about as good as it gets), somewhat in the mood of "Black Magic Woman" and ends with "It's All Good," which plays unholy havoc with the popular catch-phrase of tenderness for the world as it is. Between, the music is hypnotizing and the words very entertaining.
The amazing performances and musical ideas on this album rank among the best ever heard on a Dylan record. The use of the accordion, multiple guitars (one wafting plaintive Hawaiian-style guitar notes through "This Dream of You" and "Life is Hard), bass, mandolin, banjo, trumpet & drums is dazzling. (Violin also is in there it sounds to me.) I've never heard anything like it. It is some beautiful music. The bands that he has put together on his last couple of albums have been among the most accomplished ever assembled. The band on this album is not necessarily that much more skilled-- but they have lots of heart and they have been put to far better, more imaginative, use. (Which is saying a lot.) If it were an instrumental album sans Bob Dylan singing it would still be an engaging, enchanting album. The keyboards, which are credited to Dylan, figure in significantly to the overall sound.
There are a lot of nice touches. Dylan breaks out into laughter, chuckling, & perhaps even cackling at several places in the album. At about the album's close, nearing the last verse of of the send-out, "It's All Good," he lets out a hell-bent "Whoah!" In "Shake Shake Mama, the way he chuckles on hitting the last three words in "we could have some real fun" sounds like the fun has begun already. One notes, that given the surfeit of gloomy songs he's crooned (the kind that often are warmly welcomed in academia) a dash of laughter is a welcome sound.
For dancers of a certain type: there are some dynamite dance songs here. Starting with "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'."
"Together Through Life" did not pounce on me during the first few listens. I began a bit biased against it based on the blase near-dismissals of it that I had read. It did sound more like rock and roll record than any he'd made in awhile, which I thought was a point in its favor. Then on further listening I found a record that picks up where "Blonde on Blonde" left off. It's a fabulous record.
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4.5 out of 5
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J. C. H. Mounsey
DYLAN'S OUT ON HIS OWN AGAIN
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2009