Contains the loveliest new song I’ve heard in decades: Bob Dylan’s new album reviewed

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Niko Vorobyov

The Golden Triangle’s Sin City is a nightmarish place

‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which of course Dylan is. This is a sometimes playful and often self-deprecating Nobel Laureate at work, the lyrics (like the vocals) carrying a whiff of late Leonard Cohen, the arrangements of some of the slower, if not funereal, songs a nod to Tom Waits.

In ‘I Contain Multitudes’, the grizzled old boomer has given us his best song since ‘Idiot Wind’; like many on here, the delicate melody is implied by the chord changes rather than explicitly stated. But what a pleasure to hear wit and articulacy in a pop song, as Dylan tells us he’s ‘just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones and them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones’, the song title hewn from Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’.