Paul Simon
Stranger to Stranger
[Concord Records]
Bob Dylan
Fallen Angels
[Columbia]
Bob Dylan and Paul Simon are two established geniuses of 1960s music who buck the trend of most vintage boomer artists by sticking to a steady release schedule of a new record about every five years. However, they are travelling in completely different directions.
Simon’s Stranger to Stranger builds on the template 2011’s very good So Beautiful or So What, which saw Simon interpolate old blues samples (amazingly, in a not totally lame way) with the multi-ethnic group that he’s been piecing together ever since the mid ’80s. The band incorporates musicians who’ve played with him since Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, and has always put primacy on groove behind Simon’s neurotic wisdom. Its attempt at perpetual synthesis feels forward-looking but simultaneously out of place in an era where appropriation is viewed very dimly.
But Stranger to Stranger’s flaws in the end come from its meandering tunes and too much of the sneering Simon from the proverbial “cinematographer’s party”, who at one point facepalmingly complains about not having a wristband for his own backstage area.
Dylan meanwhile has since the mid 1990s been ploughing a path backwards in time, indulging his love of folk history and Americana. While on the Time Out Of Mind and “Love and Theft” he’d stolen lines, verses and themes wholesale and rewoven them, for the second record in a row he’s just going straight over old numbers from the Great American Songbook. Some lovely, intimate arrangements and performances aside, it feels a bit bloodless.
Words: Ian Lamont
