Word: albums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With a splendid new album, Oh Mercy, due out in September, and on the strength of permanent regard, Bob Dylan hit the road again, doing the vintage songs in new ways, singing the newer songs as if they'd just been minted. Dylan perpetually remakes himself, reshapes his work. He has made history, but even the most dedicated fan knows that Dylan's history is peculiar, part of the past with a claim on the future, but existing in a kind of new space, a new tense: the present imperfect...
...adventurous, untutored and self- destructive. Something may have been kindled that night, but it took 18 months to work it into a flame. Now the Pogues burn reckless and bright, working weird wonders on old Irish airs, giving errant folk melodies a strong bracing of rock. The new Pogues album has the kind of title that makes a sucker out of anyone who doesn't know the band; Peace and Love is full of spunk and sass, unreconstructed punk attitude hiding a hard social conscience. Chits will no longer be tossed...
...comments. "Everybody writes." Jem Finer, who plays banjo, sax and hurdy-gurdy and who pulled the Pogues together in the early days, has written, with the aid of a "very old Italian phrase book," an aria. "We've rehearsed it," he reveals, "but it wasn't recorded for the album. Various factions thought it was pushing things a bit far. But opera is one of our secret desires." Unlike British soldiers on a pub crawl, opera fans have been known to throw objects somewhat heftier than chits. But after nearly a decade, the Pogues still dote on stirring things...
BODEANS: HOME (Slash/Reprise). Brand New is the title of one of this album's best cuts, but BoDeans fans will be cheered to know that the band's still doing what it has always done best: focused, aggressive rock that doesn't stint on spirit...
Henley knows all the odd angles in the geometry of love. In one of his best songs, Long Way Home, he wrote, "There are three sides to every story:/ Yours, mine, and the cold, hard truth." There seems to be a lot of truth on this new album. Much of it sounds tough, as on one of Henley's favorite tracks, I Will Not Go Quietly ("It kicks ass more than any previous rock-'n'- roll songs I've done"), but nothing is delivered here with the jaded swagger that often got the Eagles branded as a slick bunch...