Word: albums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...song "Is Your Love In Vain" and the rest of Dylan's recently released Street Legal album rekindle the cries that he has sold out and, worse, sold out to pop. The critics-confident they finally have the smoking gun-begin once again to close in on Dylan; but as the trial opens the only one missing from the scene is the Jack of Hearts himself. Dylan, it seems, has slipped away by declaring himself an "entertainer" and by developing a style to prove it; he shrugs off criticism as if those who simply view him as a poet-prophet...
Street Legal is Dylan's most ambitious album since Blood on the Tracks. Carefully matching vocals with instrumentals and relying heavily on three female background vocalists, Dylan has his new style coming through on every cut. While the songs are linked together by a common style and, to a lesser degree, common lyrical themes, they are far from consistent and stand together almost as an ad hoc collection of musical experiments, with Dylan the Mixer finding still more ways to work background vocals into his songs...
...Your Love in Vain?" is the most popular song on the album-and the most mediocre. The trumpet-heralded introduction sounds smooth, all right, but the pastiche of instrumentals, background vocals and Dylan's lyrics fails to gel. The instrumentals and female vocalists in the chorus only serve to take away what power the lyrics have; in addition, the words themselves are not above suspicion, with lines like "All right, I'll take a chance, I'll fall in love with you" and the chorus "Are you going to risk it all, or is your love in vain?" Smooth...
...however, he can no longer side-step lines with a snarl. For example, the bouncy style of "True Love Tends To Forget" gives him no way to sing the lines "I saw you drift into infinity and come back again" without sounding stupid. In the worst songs of the album-"True Love," "We Better Talk This Over" and "New Pony"-the lyrics fall flat, while the instrumentals and heavy back-up vocals in the choruses compound the injury by making the tunes well-night indistinguishable from a thousand pop-rock songs...
...Rolling Stones: Some Girls (Rolling Stones Records). Raw, saw-toothed rock 'n' roll, rightly acclaimed as the best Stones album since Exile on Main Street (1972). Some Girls does not have the below-the-belt punch of Exile, despite low-down tunes and sulfurous lyrics. Keith Richards often sounds as if he is going to burn his fingers off on the guitar. Charlie Watts' drumming rolls all the way between a fondle and a mugging, and Mick Jagger sings with spirited cool. The problem may be that after all this time, the brimstone is dying...