Tempest
| Bob Dylan
Tempest
Tempest is the 35th studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on September 10, 2012 by Columbia Records. The album was recorded at Jackson Browne's Groove Masters Studios in Santa Monica, California. Dylan wrote all of the songs himself with the exception of the track "Duquesne Whistle", which he co-wrote with Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead..Tempest was released to acclaim from music critics, who praised its traditional music influences and Dylan's dark lyrics. The album peaked at number 3 on the Billboard 200. It is, to date, the last album of new Bob Dylan songs.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
August 30, 2012. Lyrically, Dylan is at the top of his game, joking around, dropping wordplay and allegories that evade pat readings and quoting other folks’ words like a freestyle rapper on fire.
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Pitchfork
September 13, 2012. the gargle, the zinger, the rollicking blues riff. The formula that made Time Out of Mind through Modern Times such a thrilling stretch feels exhausted now, and Dylan relies on his own gruffness as a substitute.
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The Guardian
September 6, 2012. Dylan's latest is angry, growling and mostly great fun. But comparing it to his best work is way over the top
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National Public Rasio
Septmeber 11, 2012. Its jazzy jauntiness is devilish and sly. It presents a Bob Dylan completely enthralled by his music, like a kid in a musical candy store.
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The New York Times
September 10, 2012. Like Mr. Dylan’s other 21st-century albums, “Tempest” feels live and rootsy, vamping along in the zone where blues, country and folk intersect.
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The New Yorker
September 11, 2012. it’s as spirited and vigorous an album as he’s made.
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Billboard
September 6, 2012. Rootsy and stylistically broad, Dylan reaches back to the styles that inspired him early on.
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Utilmate Classic Rock
September 13, 2012. is a reflection of a past that Dylan doesn’t want to shake, unlike his repeated attempts to demolish his own legend over the decades.
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AV Club Music
September 12, 2012. tracks filled with fatalistic lyrics that find hope only in companionship, and even then, sometimes only the illusion of hope.
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Consequence of Sound
September 12, 2012. is the perfect storm of everything we love, can’t stand, and just shrug our shoulders about when it comes to late-era Bob Dylan.
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Paste Magazine
September 11, 2012. is one of the most cohesive, musically and lyrically intense records he’s put together in years.
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American Songwriter
September 4, 2012. It’s completely unassuming and charming, something that might accompany a beautiful sunset or moonlight glancing off a tranquil ocean.
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New Musical Express
September 7, 2012. So the time is now for his 35th(!) studio album, which features 10 sprawling yarns about the misery in this world.
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BBC Music
Like its predecessors, this set’s pace and style is informal and, in most respects, largely unremarkable beyond the grizzled patina of Dylan’s rasping delivery.
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The Telegraph
September 7, 2012. The whole album resounds with snappy jokes and dark ruminations, vivid sketches and philosophical asides.
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Uncut
September 7, 2012. is in many respects the most far-reaching, provocative and transfixing album of Dylan’s later career. Nothing about it suggests a swansong, adios or fond adieu.
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Salon
September 13, 2012. The icon's new album is an exercise in beauty and refinement -- but also staggeringly loose, warm and alive.
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Slant Magazine
September 9, 2012. pays homage to the sinister, protracted plots of prewar folk, and represents a welcome retreat from the fuzzily declarative lyrics of his last two releases.
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Pop Matters
September 9, 2012. Dylan is once again trading in a sort of musical nostalgia his snarling younger self might have scoffed at, but this great set is more playful and expansive than some of its predecessors.
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Tiny Mix Tapes
Tempest seems to stand out from its precursors in ability and scope, including the much lauded Time Out Of Mind. Tempest’s epic scale and grandeur makes his few previous albums look like short stories leading up to a great novel.
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The Line of Best Fit
September 18, 2012. It’s not quite up there with the best of Dylan’s recent(ish) batch of records . . . . It is, however, a million miles more inspired than 2008′s light-hearted (or just plain lazy?) Together Through Life.
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Chicago Tribune
September 7, 2012. He is resigned to how the world is, lawless and degrading. But he does what must be done.
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The Arts Desk
September 9, 2012. perhaps the darkest, in a series of sung chronicles, blues-soaked dirges and timeless ballads that draw from the poet’s seemingly unstoppable stream of memories, dreams and reflections.
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NY Daily News
September 11, 2012. Dastardly deeds and tragic circumstances of this sort form the nasty core of Bob Dylan's latest disc. Fifty years into a storied career, the bard has cooked up a work primed to rival the most carnage-crazed CDs of gangsta rap.
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The Cinch Review
September 10, 2012. the lyrics are intricate and filled with terrific rhymes, and burst forth in his torn-up voice yet highly nuanced singing with confidence and purpose.
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The Washington Post
September 10, 2012. Couching images of end-times America in old-time American melodies, the 71-year-old has delivered his most compelling release in more than a decade.
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Record Collector
Dylan finds that “while my back was turned/ The whole world behind me burned”; he tosses with anger as Tempest builds, from threatening to take his woman to jail someday.
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Independent
September 8. 2012. Issued on the 50th anniversary of the release of Dylan's debut album, Tempest is a typical celebration of storytelling and blues, in roughly equal proportions.
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Spin
September 11, 2012. His voice, too, is recorded perfectly, airy and wry in places, craggy and devilish in others. His grim fatalism is rendered gorgeously and with precision — the lyrically tricky, formally playful albums he’s made since the critical and commercial comeback of 1998’s Time Out of Mind have also been the best-recorded of his career.
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Wales Arts Review
October 10, 2012. Tempest shows Dylan as comfortable musically as he has ever been. He has his extremely accomplished band of pub-rockers, his Nashville sheen.
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Newsday
September 10, 2012. is filled with folk-rock, masterfully tinged with blues and jazzy touches.
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Seattle PI
September 13, 2012. there is plenty of red meat in the wordplay to sift through and try to decipher. Perhaps in a nod from the bard to the mostly pessimistic mood of these times, these songs also represent some of Dylan's darkest songwriting ever.
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Huffpost
December 11, 2012. Essentially, Tempest is one of the more varied and interesting records Dylan has produced for a while. -singing chilling, mesmerizing and at times terrifying ballads; but he doesn't do it like anyone else. He does it his way, and no one does it better.
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No Ripcord
September 17, 2012. there are always critics who quickly hail it as a return to form or a new phase for Dylan, but if you’re even remotely familiar with his admittedly extensive discography, this is precisely the kind of album that Dylan loves to release.
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Drowned In Sound
September 12, 2012. Tempest returns to a place where bleakness threatens every doorstep. It reflects its title, not in the music (which is the same delectably relaxed and slow-aged blend of blues, country and folk as his recent releases.
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Exclaim!
September 24, 2012. Tempest is a mixed bag of ideas at best, many of which would be better served by someone like Tom Waits, and a further indication that Dylan's pronouncement in 1965 that "he not busy being born is busy dying" is absolutely true.
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Rock NYC
September 7, 2012. And it may be a must hear even if it is so solipsistic in its damaged sorrow, all you are getting is further insight into the strangeness that is Dylan.
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The Sun
September 6, 2012. contains a line that sums up Dylan’s current attitude to life and why Tempest is such a magnificent beast of an album. “I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings.”
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Papyrus
September 28, 2012. . . . Dylan’s voice on Tempest is much less raspy and gravely, something best left to Tom Waits. With that said, the entire album is one of the most solid works he’s put out in years, and with albums like Modern Times, that says a lot.
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RSJ Online
November 11,2112. It demonstrates again that he can turn bad news into good news, deficiency into asset like no other. Clocking nearly 70 minutes, it is an emotional salad of unrest, mortality, morality, love, hate, vengeance, everything.
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NOW
September 6, 2012. Dylan is sounding particularly old-timey on Tempest, and Los Lobos' David Hidalgo helps get that grimy pre-rock 'n' roll vibe right. They're going for a lo-fi 1950s single-microphone recording sound, with the band distant and boxy and Dylan's voice front and centre.
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Offbeat
Octobrt 1, 2012. The saga starts with a man on a train passing through Carbondale, Illinois, riding home on the City of New Orleans. It ends at the grave of John Lennon in the night-shrouded forest, telling us to “cover him and let him sleep.” It reminds me of Mark Twain or maybe a one-hour, eight-minute version of “Desolation Row.”
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Live For Live Music
September 10, 2012. Never before have I ever been so engaged with every song on an album during my first listen. Intensity burns in every verse, and Dylan’s got the blood of the land in his voice.
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The Austin Chronicle
October 5, 2012. What Tempest shares in common with his best work is an unparalleled knack for narrative.
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Alan Bumstead
July 19, 2012. The thrill is in hearing such a cross-sectional hodgepodgian mishmash of eclectic ways to say ‘Dylanesque pastiche.’ Like the surface of the earth, he’s all over the place—
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Entertainment
September 19, 2012. He’s never been mistaken for Enrico Caruso, but on his death-haunted latest, Tempest, the 71-year-old is in especially fine rattle, wringing every wrecked nuance out of his almost unbearably expressive voice.
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Daily Breeze
September 15, 2012. “Tempest” has more than its share of brilliant moments, but also contains long, arid stretches. In other words, it’s a typical late Dylan album: an enjoyable but not wholly essential addition to an incredible body of work.
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The Scotsman
September 10, 2012. Lyrically there are highs and lows (although more of the former), but the music on the album is unimpeachable, a classy tour through the roots Americana of the 20th century’s first four-fifths.
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Spotlight Report
September 27, 2012. Tempest is certainly a refresh to listen to.
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The Atlantic
September 11, 2012. is great, and of course it's great—at this point, 15 years after Time Out of Mind announced his return to some entirely new type of form, that statement seems expected and unremarkable, and that unremarkableness is nothing less than astonishing.
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Glide Magazine
October 8, 2012. he draws so artfully and effectively, not just on his roots, but his own storied history.
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Desert News
September 10, 2012. "Tempest" is no doubt the best album you'll ever hear from a 71-year-old. If that sounds like damning Bob Dylan with faint praise, rest assured this is one of the best discs you'll hear by anyone this year.
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Thank Folk for That
September 13, 2012. The beautifully played blues, rockabilly, folk and country on Tempest indicates still Bob’s ability to listen to a song.
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Madison.com
September 10, 2012. plunges even further into the past for musical inspiration, flirting with the early blues and Americana of the 1940s.
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Easy Street Records
And now here comes Tempest, the first proper studio album since I officially became a Bob Dylan fan - and it was worth waiting for.
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Analog Planet
September 13, 2012. While this may sound grim, the album is sprinkled with humor and levity as Dylan tells his stories from a mountain top of age and experience.
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Bob Dylan - Visions of Dylan
captures rage vividly in song, yet often delivers wistful and tender lyrics. In his song “Tempest” the watchman on the Titanic is the only person who knows the ship will sink.
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RTE
September 18, 2012. The music is tumbling and rough-edged but with a kind of warm, twinkling contentment to it as rock 'n' roll’s Satchmo wheezes and rasps his way gamely through a great set of tunes. Tempest includes some short, beautifully-formed tracks but this being Dylan, lyrical elaboration and extended grooves are also present.
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The Four Oh Five
September 11, 2012. is it possible for him to make a bad record (or at least one worse than Self Portrait)? - and there's certainly some evocative, lyrical imagery throughout . . . .
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Montreal Gazette
September 7, 2012. Tempest also ranks among Dylan’s darker works, largely because it has the highest death toll. In his senior years,
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qconline.com
September 15, 2012. "Tempest" is more concerned with the scraps of the '20s, '30s and '40s, as Dylan continues to explore the various strands of early American roots music that he internalized as he matured, sticking to basic instrumentation: guitar, drums, bass, violin, banjo and the occasional accordion.
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Biff Bam Pop!
September 9, 2012. There’s blues, jazz, rockabilly, country, folk and rock ‘n’ roll on full display, acting like a soundtrack for Dylan`s takes of love, loss, tragedy and despair.
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Spectrum Culture
September 13, 2012. Death hangs over Tempest like the ominous vultures circling above the rotting corpse of Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s masterpiece As I Lay Dying.
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Chunky Glasses
September 11, 2012. the bar is set high for Dylan’s 35th studio album, Tempest, and sadly, it falls short. It’s certainly an ambitious project.
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Sing Out!
June 26, 2017. Tempest is among Dylan’s more religious and metaphysical albums, although it diverts from the album he initially planned. It includes murder ballads, disaster songs, and a worthy heir to “Barbara Allan” in “Scarlet Town.” The title track rests at the center of this religious and metaphysical theme.
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The Shields Gazette
September 18, 2012. HALF a century since his first album, Dylan is on a creative high with his latest release. Blues, country and traditional folk tunes are the musical templates for stark death ballads, tales of love gone wrong and even darker prophesies about the end times.
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Beats Per Minute
October 2, 2012. succeeds enormously, placing it not only in the upper half of Dylan’s catalog, but also with the better submissions of 2012.
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Tampa Bay Times
September 10, 2012. Bob Dylan's new album 'Tempest' is breathtaking but bleak.
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Beat
So what does Bob Dylan have left to say in 2012? Judging by Dylan’s latest record, Tempest, plenty, and most of it doused in the blues.
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Rocksucker
October 4, 2012. If a band makes it to four albums these days, they’ve made a pretty decent fist of it. Tempest is Bob Dylan’s 35th, and as noted elsewhere it’s another age-defying work of excellence that furthers his remarkable and unusual spell of latter-day form.
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Vocals On Top
October 9, 2012. Since 1997 he has released three stone-cold classic albums and one very good album, then there is Tempest. Tempest is not a bad record but it clearly pales in comparison to the giants that preceded it
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Friday Night Boys
August 27, 2012. Tempest is Dylan's best musical album of this century, a vibrant maximising of strict rules and the savaged leather state of that voice. He mostly sticks to his small range, in whispered, menacing close-up, and his band
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Express
September 7, 2012. Marking the 50th anniversary of his first album, Bob Dylan has come up with this collection of new material, which should do nothing to diminish his standing as a legend of rock/folk/blues/ other genres.
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KVNF Mountain Grown Community Radio
September 9, 2012. Fan or not you won’t be sorry – just listen closely a number of times so the mysteries can unfold, humor appear, politics rear its head, and great story telling evolve.
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Time Out Bahrain
November 27, 2012. The music, too, has continued to devolve as Dylan delves further into the weathered world of the past In spirit, Tempest goes even further back into Americana folklore, long before even Dylan’s primary influence, Woody Guthrie.
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Stuff
May 10, 2012. At first listen it sounds consistent with Dylan’s apocalyptic tone of recent albums. Like so much of Dylan, it is fun unravelling the mysteries and allusions
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Kenny Wilson's Blog
December 4, 2012. in my opinion having only heard it a few times, I think it is one of the best albums Dylan has ever made. Sure, his voice is a rasp but it is a supremely expressive and musical rasp.
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Circuit Sweet
is a great record, (my favourite since ‘Time Out Of Mind’) and is filled with highlights.
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Baugh's Blog
September 29, 2012. For me, a disappointing album. Much of the music here is monotonous. The songs often feature uninspired two-or-three note melodies. The arrangements generate no interest in the songs. There is little momentum to the album as a whole.
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Wrongmog
September 6, 2012. Dylan's latest is angry, growling and mostly great fun. But comparing it to his best work is way over the top.
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Gary Revel
March 29, 2015. deserves a serious listen, so give Dylan his proper due.
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Pretty Much Amazing
September 4, 2012. It's an interesting dichotomy, even for the uninitiated.
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Vintage Rock
A good-timey sounding record with infectious rhythms and serious, borderline morbid undertones, Tempest treads confidently on the notion that Bob Dylan is a national treasure who can do whatever the hell strikes his fancy.
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Front Psych
September 11, 2012. is as vein-draining as Time Out of Mind, often as lyrically dense as Love and Theft, with a new and thrilling element included: Dramatic Storytelling.
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Maggie's Farm Italian site of Bob Dylan
"Tempest" is a beautiful album, among the best of Dylan, one step away from the masterpiece, is the record of maturity, pain, anger, especially a deeply obscure record, which tells old stories, of big ships that sink with everything their human load of hopes and disappointments, as often happens in life.
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Daily Local News
September 11, 2012. Bob Dylan's latest CD is filled with folk-rock, masterfully tinged with blues and jazzy touches and is angry, snarling, but mostly fun.
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itunes Apple Music
This is dark, dusty music with secrets tucked inside its riddles.
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Culture Fly
September 16, 2012. it’s very much a continuation of the same ragged, old-timey blues he’s been turning out with startlingly efficiency since his 1997 return to prominence with Time Out Of Mind.
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Sound Opinions
September 21, 2012. Nevertheless, it's the voice, Greg says, the really carries this album. It's perfect for the spur-of-the-moment, rough and rowdy honky-tonk feel Dylan is going for.
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Entertainment The Onion
September 19, 2012. “Dying has lent his voice a certain rough yet poignant gravitas. One can clearly hear how the dead tissue in his vocal cords has deteriorated to the point where there’s almost nothing left. Nothing, that is, except the genius of a master songwriter still in full command of his powers, even seven years after expiring.”
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Hi-Fi+
March 6, 2012. True to form, the self-produced Tempest features mandolins, violins, banjos, acoustic and steel guitars, upright bass, and accordion playing strains of country, country swing, blues, rockabilly, and folk music. Lyrically, too, the past is present.
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The Globe And Mail
September 7, 2012. Dylan's Tempest finds a rich-blooded master in a sort of late-life blossom . . . . There's a glow to the roots-rock sound here.
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Eden On The Line
September 13, 2012. Inevitably, it isn't quite as good as some of the 5-star reviews suggest: it is an unavoidable fact that Bob does not sing or write as well as he used to.
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Independent.IE
December 22, 2018. This is an album I can’t wait to hear again, the sound of a great artist approaching the twilight of his career with fearless creativity, our finest songwriter regarding the murderous madness of the world with an unflinching gaze and a loving heart.
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Countdown Kid
July 26, 2013. Full of darkness, grit, and violence, yet leavened by moments of great tenderness, the album was the most ambitious Dylan had attempted in about four decades, and wouldn’t you know he pulled it off stunningly.
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The Internation Review Of Music
September 15, 2012. Savage imagery of Hell on earth, twisted ultra violence, sinking ships, whores, and dying villains mixed with the language and rhythms of true American blues, country, Celtic traditions, and R&B make Bob Dylan’s Tempest a sinister yet melancholy masterpiece.
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The Oxonian Review
December 16, 2012. is hardly the valedictory and retrospective project that some critics would have it be. Rather, it demonstrates the remarkable vitality and consistency of Dylan’s artistic practice from 1962 to 2012: like so many of his albums, this one openly mines past materials,
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Rock 104 Blog
September 14, 2012. you get a little a bit of everything that a 71-year-old Dylan can offer: his dark awareness of mortality, his unique wit, his masterful storytelling, his yearning need for romance, and his deep feelings of philosophy and spirituality.
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Atticus Review
August 11, 2015. an album of songs stripped down and simple and yet expansive with their poetic venom, defiance and even nostalgia if one considers his Celtic flavored title song about the Titanic disaster.
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Narendra Kusnur's music musings
September 10, 2012. Pretty long, for sure, with five numbers lasting over seven minutes. But it’s also clearly his best album in a decade, after 2001’s masterpiece ‘Love and Theft’.
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Music Vice
October 4, 2012. Unlike his work from the sixties and seventies, Dylan does not unleash his scathing wit on rivals, old lovers or enemies here. Tempest is a conversation with death
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The Telegraph - cloudfront.net
August , 2012. Although unfolding with a lot of wit and relish, this is Dylan’s darkest, maddest, most provocative collection of songs in a long time.
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Jake's Take
September 9, 2012. dives into darker material such as murder, betrayal, death and destruction which can be heard on several tracks including “Pay in Blood” and “Scarlet Town.”
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The Ithacan
September 27, 2012. is far from perfect. It is, however, far from mediocre, as Dylan’s lyrics evoke emotion and prove to be powerful enough to cause the listener to disregard the singer’s weathered voice and genuinely enjoy the music.
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Soundi
September 9, 2012. Tempest is fine and, ultimately, a pretty hypnotic disc that takes a lot of listening.
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