Bob Dylan Fallen Angels
| Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan Fallen Angels
Fallen Angels is the 37th studio album by Bob Dylan, released by Columbia Records on May 20, 2016.[1] The album consists of cover versions of twelve classic American songs chosen by Dylan from a diverse array of writers such as Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn and Carolyn Leigh..Much like the album's predecessor, Shadows in the Night, every song on the album, except for "Skylark", was once recorded by Frank Sinatra.The album has received generally favorable reviews from critics, with particular praise for Dylan's vocal performance, production quality, and the arrangements of his band Fallen Angels received a nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards, held in February 2017.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rollling Stone
May 19, 2016. Fallen Angels isn’t merely overstock from last year’s Shadows In The Night, though Dylan’s approach is similar. His phrasing remains spectacular, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, and the playing is sublime.
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Pitchfork
May 23, 2016. Following on last year's Frank Sinatra tribute Shadows in the Night, Dylan's latest finds him once again putting his own idiosyncratic spin on a set of standards.
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National Public Radio Music
May 12, 2016. These are old songs sung by an old guy who is fully owning the oldness, the melancholy, the spontaneous outbreaks of gushy sentimentality.
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The Guardian
May 19, 2016. Fallen Angels sounds like another love letter to Dylan’s own youth, and it’s charming.
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Consequence Of Sound
May 15, 2016. . . . Fallen Angels finds Dylan emerging from the gloomy stillness of winter into the relatively lighter air of springtime.
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Ulltimate Classic Rock
May 16, 2016. Sticking with the traditional instrumentation and deliberate vocal phrasing that have driven his albums for the past 20 years, Dylan covers these ballads like an old pro. They suit him just as he much as he's suited to them at this point in his long career.
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Paste Magazine
May 20, 2016. To start with, the arrangements on Fallen Angels are wonderful and sumptuous. Recorded with his longtime touring band, it’s easy to hear how working with this music has breathed new life into them as a performing unit. Their playing is loose, easy and natural, and they sound like they’re having a lot of fun.
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All Music
May 20, 2016. These wise, wily interpretations underscore Dylan's ultimate aim with these Sinatra records, which is to slyly tie together various strands of American music, bringing Tin Pan Alley to the barrooms and taking the backwoods uptown. The results are understated yet extraordinary, an idiosyncratic, romantic vision of 20th century America.
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Independent
May 18, 2016. The restrained picking and creamy pedal-steel guitar of his live band imposes a smooth but demotic country mood behind Dylan’s elegant, world-weary croon
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LA Times
May 18, 2016. reaches to the blues at the core of many of these songs. Thus, they elicit the ache of romantic yearning and loss that often gets subsumed by swelling orchestral forces, background choirs or by singers who are more focused on crafting elegant vocals than finding emotional resonance.
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USA Today
May 13, 2016. This is what a seasoned performer can do with words and music, whether his own or someone else's. Dylan deserves thanks for reminding us of that, again.
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The Telegraph
May 13, 2016. Close your eyes, close the door… bring those slippers over here. Bob Dylan is back with another tasteful, countrified collection of American Standards.
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Pop Matters
May 20, 2016. Fallen Angels is a touching tribute to Dylan’s continued passion for music, his love of performing and a celebration of some damn good songs.
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Drowned In Sound
May 20, 2016. This is Dylan at his most tender, and vocally as smooth as he’s ever been or ever likely to be.
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The Young Folks
Mya 22, 2016. . . . Fallen Angels shows how terrific a recording artist he is, with or without his own lyrics backing him up.
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Post To Wire
June 8, 2016. If anything the pacing lags on some songs here, the weary tone that previously conveyed hushed beauty and grace now at times drags the mood down.
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The Fire Note
August 1, 2016. While Shadows is a moody, late-night film-noir soundtrack, Fallen Angels is more like the sunny, romantic accompaniment to 8-mm home movies of your grandparents at the beach in the 50s: it’s warm, nostalgic, and generally more upbeat in tone than Shadows, which makes work nicely as that album’s thematic foil.
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Financial Times
May 20, 2016. Jazzy guitar and drums are spiced up with western swing and Hawaiian exotica. But the arrangements suffer from sameyness and the songs are shadowed by the knowledge that all fairy tales must come to an end.
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Glide Magazine
June 2, 2016. What distinguishes Fallen Angels from Shadows in the Night, first of all, is the tenor of the material. In contrast to the noir atmosphere of the latter, this album is a generally sunnier, upbeat selection of tunes and, as was the case before, it works.
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The Morton Report
June 13, 2016. And after two albums of covers in a row, I’m starting to miss hearing new dispatches from his brain. So I’m eager to listen to Dylan’s next collection of originals. Meanwhile, though, I look forward to spending more time with the largely superlative Fallen Angels.
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Music OMH
June 5, 2016. . . . it’s hard not to be disappointed that Dylan isn’t taking just a few more risks. While he performs the songs here with admirable poise, he seems content to just interpret them faithfully rather than bending them to his will and making them his own.
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Noted
June 22, 2016. Fallen Angels is more a shared playlist than a reinterpretation of classics.
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RTE
May 25, 2016. Dylan returns with another volume of pre-rock classics. It lacks the element of surprise of Shadows in the Night but it is warm and beautifully played
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Cover Me songs
May 25, 2016. No more, no less, Fallen Angels is to be taken on its own terms, enjoyed at face value and treasured for the pleasure it gave Dylan – check the barely contained on-mic laugh near the end of “Old Black Magic” – and will likely give all but the most jaded listeners.
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The Cinch Review
June 20, 2016. Love in the end is clearly the key that opens up all of these songs, and, in Dylan’s voice, they shimmer and grow and resonate in a special way.
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South China Morning Post
May 22, 2016. . . . on his new album, Dylan is pursuing an unlikely late-career incarnation as a 21st-century Sinatra, interpreting songs made popular by the late singing icon and remoulding the tunes with a rugged intimacy that is classically Dylan.
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Daily Herald
May 25, 2016. Opting to use his own band, and not an orchestra, Dylan creates a relaxed, mellow mood and sounds in fine spirits as he croons his way through 12 familiar songs including "Young at Heart" and "That Old Black Magic."
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The Edge
May 24, 2016. Fallen Angels is one of Dylan's most consistent and predictable albums yet.
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Spectrum Culture
May 19, 2016. Fallen Angels shows the senior troubadour having a sincere good time with the repertoire.
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The Arts Desk
May 18, 2016. In his latest album, Bob Dylan once again interprets, in his own slightly ironic and yet lovingly respectful way, standards that Sinatra made famous.
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Shepherd Express
May 31, 2016. His voice breaks as it searches for the right notes in “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” but he seems at peace with his limitations. The acoustic guitar, violin, upright string bass and brushed drums accompanying him are suitably low key and sweet.
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13th Floor
May 25, 2016. Dylan himself seems to be in even better voice than he was on Shadows In The Night. Of course he’s still raspy, but his delivery, his interpretation, is quite breath-taking. I love how he slides up to reach the last note of All The Way and the way we sings, “as we floated over the floooor”, during Polka Dots And Moonbeams.
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Julesburg Advocate
May 19, 2016. Opting to use his own band, and not an orchestra, Dylan creates a relaxed, mellow mood and sounds in fine spirits as he croons his way through 12 familiar songs including "Young at Heart" and "That Old Black Magic."
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The 405
May 20, 2016. Fallen Angels, Bob Dylan's thirty-seventh studio album slinks into the room with understated, but supremely pleasant pedal steel, guitar and strings.
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The National
May 30, 2016. Bob Dylan creates a relaxing and mellow mood in Fallen Angels
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NOW
May 18, 2016. Here, Dylan does some celestial rendering of Sinatra songs. Recording in the same Capitol Studios, pondering Sinatra's versions ahead of his own takes, Dylan and his band capture a compelling tension between the sunny and dark aspects of love songs.
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Psychedelic Baby Magazine
2016. Call this gathering of songs whimsical if you will, but please, do not call them great or inspirational, as they come off rather lightweight, shadows of shadows, delivered by a man who may or may not be in the moment as these tracks were recorded.
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Exclaim!
May 20, 2016. On Fallen Angels, they still come across as songs of yearning and learning in love, but are far softer and more humble about it all.
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Richer Sounds
June 6, 2016. Fallen Angels, as the release is titled, is no mere selection of offcuts, with some well-known tracks making it onto the tracklisting this time around. With a more upbeat tone – only slightly, mind – than Shadows, Fallen Angels sees Dylan and his band in a playful mood, all the while delivering these tracks with respect and admiration.
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Chicago Tribune
May 20, 2016. What makes these projects more than just nostalgia pieces is the approach. . . . Dylan goes for more of a sparse, Western plains approach. His are atmospheric, country-tinged interpretations, and they prompt a fresh appreciation of the craft underlying these tunes.
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Peter Douglas - A Medium Corporation
May 26, 2016. What’s left is a low-key joy of an album, another highlight in Dylan’s later-day purple patch, and one of the lightest and brightest and most successful records in Dylan’s admittedly rich post-Time Out of Mind catalogue.
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The Line Of Best Fit
May 30, 2016. . . . Dylan emerged as a playful, cantankerous crooner and brought his quirks and idiosyncrasies to some of the great standards of the 40s and 50s
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Live For Live Music
May 15, 2016. With so many chart toppers in Sinatra’s ouevre drawing the majority of history’s attention, it’s refreshing and completely expected that an artist of Dylan’s nature would pepper the collection with a truly representative breadth of material.
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We Plug Good Music
May 20, 2016. his spirit and soul are undoubtedly present but there are still Sinatra vibes that seep through. Bob Dylan has yet again produced a successful album.
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Best Classic Bands
Update (February 20, 2016.) It’s an even bolder singer’s album, and make no mistake.
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Colorado The Gazette
May 23, 2016. creates a relaxed, mellow mood and sounds in fine spirits.
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Colorado Daily Music
May 23, 2016. His skill has always been in connection, in expression, in using his voice to capture the essence of the song he is singing.
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Stuff
May 26, 2016. I'd describe this disc as Americana in its broadest sense, not just in the field of the current country artists,
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The Northern Advocate
July 21, 2016. On Fallen Angels we're again taken on a trip through the Great American Songbook. Compared to Shadows in the Night, last year's moody and similar album, this one is more upbeat and we find Dylan taking in songs with a more positive message.
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Vintage Vinyl News
May 19 , 2016. Fallen Angels keeps everything that was right about the first set. Dylan once again performs over a small group of excellent musicians who evoke a small jazz band of the thirties.
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MOJO
May 18, 2016. Dylan reverts once more to his first language of song, and beautifully.
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Classic Rock
May 24, 2016. Dylan strives to sing beautifully, giving the crooner to American standards written around the mid-20th century and largely popularized by Sinatra as well.
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LAUT.DE
May 20, 2016. But the path he took with " Shadows In The Night " is consistently pursued in "Fallen Angels", bringing his bow to the greats of the genre to a dignified end. Rarely, Dylan sounded more conciliatory, but also more sentimental than here.
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Uinterview
May 31, 2016. Dylan’s ability to cover the old standards is impeccable, though it is closer to a mere delivery rather than a unique interpretation. His sound is effortless and the pronounced melodic clarity of his covers is the essence of what makes this record truly Dylan’s.
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itunes Apple Music
But even when Dylan glides through something as familiar as “That Old Black Magic,” the intimate setting and his effortless delivery make it a refreshing delight.
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RZN
June 7, 2016. Dylan makes his reverence for these songs clear in the way he sings them. His pitch may be shaky in places, but he honors the melodies and finds something in the words that evidently speaks to his mood.
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Metal 1.info
June 2, 2016 With his swing-and jazz-infected reinterpretations of these old pop songs, BOB DYLAN sharpens the outline of a new section of his musical work.
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Duluth News Tribune
June 2, 2016. The sparse, jazzy songs feel loved, gently caressed by the musicians who support Dylan’s vocals, which are again playful and sentimental without going over the top into maudlin territory.
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Heavy Pop
May 21, 2016. like fresh pulled out of the time capsule. Such a sensitive as in the best sense harmless magic declaration of love to possibly really better epochs, to which one can lose his heart, while one begins to meekly doze and nestles an idyllic contentment in the dreams.
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Freaky Party Music Reviews
May 19, 2016. The arrangements aren’t faithful in any way to those that made these songs famous – That Old Black Magic becomes a rockabilly shuffle – but there’s a certain loveliness to them.
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The Daily Beast
May 24, 2016. his world-weary septuagenarian croon is stellar; the arrangements are beautiful; and the performances are tight.
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Out Riderr
May 24, 2016. One listen to these slaughtered classics might set you against these numbers for all time to come. My advice to you is; DO NOT BUY or LISTEN TO THIS GARBAGE!
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Amoeba Music
May 17, 2016. Fallen Angels wears its sincerity right on its sleeve as he sings love ballads without a hint of irony or any of the cynicism for which he's known.
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Steve Hoffman Music Forums
May 20, 2016. Fallen Angels is a novelty, a curio, a sideshow. While it’s hardly an embarrassment (if nothing else, Dylan’s great band ensures against that), it's probably not worthy of repeated listening or serious consideration for anyone other than the most Bobsessive fanboys.
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The Irish Times
May 19, 2016. It’s a game of two halves, essentially: fans will surely appreciate delicate renderings of songs such as That Old Black Magic, All the Way, Young at Heart, and All or Nothing at All, yet might think that Dylan has already “uncovered” more than enough American Songbook selections.
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