Women and Country By Jakob Dylan

It might be hard to find someone who thinks Jakob Dylan is a terrible singer-songwriter. The possible father complex and influences aside, Bob’s son has a lullaby-esque voice that can portray anything from a lover’s deep and poignant pain to an indictment of modern society for keeping evil alive and well. He had a respectable amount of indie success in the ‘90s with his own band, The Wallflowers, before indie became too fashionable. But, alas, his first solo album, 2008’s Seeing Things, remained less than compelling with too many acoustic folk intimations and not enough lyrical and musical absorption. His new record Women And Country delivers everywhere the last album didn’t.

Don’t get confused suddenly – Dylan hasn’t gone hard rock or anything like that. But there’s a much more enticing vibe on this album with musical variety and an experiment with different beats that the last record was sorely lacking.

“Nothing But The Whole Wide World” starts the album out with a thrumming drum beat that makes you feel like you’re embarking on a personal journey with Dylan. His voice sweeps over the lyrics like an old man looking out over his life experience like a valley of fields. It’s a spectacular array of emotion for such a relatively young singer to portray and it’s what sets Dylan apart from his peers.

From the acoustic layout of the first song, things get ever barer on “Down On Our Own Shield,” but then on “Lend A Hand” they suddenly pick up again with a jazzy saxophone that places Dylan in the sultry musical heat of somewhere like New Orleans and his music rises to meet all the expectations that flow into this sort of sound.

Similarly, “Holy Rollers For Love” and “Truth For A Truth” experiment with other musical devices like choral backing vocals and a plangent electric guitar. Indeed, Kelly Hogan’s backing vocals compliment Dylan so well in “Truth For A Truth” that the song ends up sounding more like a back-and-forth dance between two people that listeners are allowed to take part in.

Dylan’s songwriting has become so masterful that it would be easy to wax poetic about the many nuances of all the songs on this record, but to sum things up we’ll say that on Women And Country he’s not trying to be The Wallflowers frontman, he’s thankfully not trying to be his father, and he’s made significant strides from his last album. So this one is highly recommended.