It’s so much easier to write a review of an album I dislike than an album I love. For the former it’s just pointing out the things that fail to click with me be it the lyrics or the style of music or whatever it might be. I try to present it creatively but it’s really just a matter of listing where it fails.
For albums I love it’s much harder. Why do I love it? How does it make me feel when I listen? How do the lyrics connect to me? How does it elicit memories of the time when I first heard it? How does it fit in the realm of cultural influence and personal influence? It’s all of these things along with something that I think is indescribable, or even unnameable. Sometimes though (and just sometimes) albums just are – they are the thing that we need to hear when we hear them, and we connect at such a deep level that it becomes a part of us, and we get to revisit that every time we listen.
Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde is one of those albums that just is that indescribable thing to me. I scanned through the reviews and some criticize his voice and some the harmonica or the length of the songs or the lyrics or whatever – but this album is Bob Dylan, it is authentic and personal and true and it creates a connection between you and him when you listen. I feel sorry for you if you don’t experience that.
In my review of The Wall I mentioned my challenge of writing something about an album that has been the subject of so much discourse already, and I think you can amplify that by 10 for anything Bob Dylan related but especially for this album.
I have given a lot of 5 star reviews here, and maybe I shouldn’t have been so generous with them, because when I give this 5 stars it doesn’t seem like enough in comparison.
To learn more about the 1001 Albums Project, I first wrote about it here.
Your thoughts?