Jakob Dylan
Seeing Things
Columbia Records
By Eliza C. Kane
It was only a week ago that I heard someone say, “What ever happened to – what’s his name? – Bob Dylan’s son? He had something going and then just disappeared.”
Indeed, it was twelve years ago that Jakob Dylan’s band, The Wallflowers, broke onto the national scene with their sophomore release, Bringing Down the Horse. Despite the mixed success of three more albums and a few tweaks in the line up, they really haven’t held popular attention since.
But mainstream music has changed since 1996. Boy bands are uncool again, allowing non-threatening pretty boy guitarists like Jack Johnson and John Mayer bigger slices of the pop music pie. As a solo artist (and certifiable pretty boy), Jakob Dylan is poised to take a respectable bite himself, but as the offspring of an icon and a former ‘90s sensation, he bears the unfortunate burden of proving his comeback three-fold.
No one could listen to Seeing Things and say Jakob Dylan took the easy road. It is not the album that would launch him back into broody MTV videos or a large venue tour -- which was probably the point. It is also not a record that will push away dreaded comparisons to the senior Dylan, as the music is folksy-acoustic, and while I won’t say the lyrics are “political,” much of them posses the wary, prophetic tone of a wartime Weatherman.
In both imagery and rhythm, Seeing Things is hitched securely to the locomotion of classic Americana myths. “Will It Grow?” gently chugs like a boxcar serenade, giving way to the almost tribal beat of “I Told You I Couldn’t Stop.” The narratives conjure various salt-of-the-earth characters: a soldier, a farmer, a boy raised by wolves. As Dylan is actually a Los Angeles resident who likely grew up with the best of everything, he draws himself a troublingly thin line to stride between keeping it real and playing lyrical dress up. Whether he pulls it off varies in degree from song to song, and is based primarily on the strength of his vocal delivery. The opening track for example, “Evil is Alive and Well,” relies too heavily on the titular refrain and lacks pitch variation to the point of sounding monotone. But when Dylan stops concentrating so hard and gives up those warm, lower notes in later songs, he makes up for it and how.
Happily, Dylan avoids the temptation to shellac every song with production touch ups -- a faux pas that cripples the aforementioned Johnson and Mayer and seriously wounded his own Horse – but the resulting starkness can also tread on tedious ground. Seeing Things is filled with extremely stripped down, finger-plucked folk songs, but the rare track that features a drum, such as “Something Good This Way Comes,” takes the pressure off Dylan to carry the whole song and in doing so allows his vocals maximum charm and levity. While it’s understood that this is a solo album and not a repackaging of The Wallflowers, such well-rounded collaborations prove the most seductive of all.
The overwhelming feeling is that this is the record Jakob Dylan always wanted to make, made the way he wanted -- without a suit breathing over his shoulder or a stylist powdering the shine off his T-zone. The result is a collection of very pretty, very soulful songs, yet not one “radio-friendly” one in the bunch – and good for him.
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