Posted by: Johnny Loftus on January 3, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Detour is curing the beginning-of-the-year blahs with a look at the 2007 releases that never quite made it to the top of our stacks, stuck around longer than usual, or are still notable even long after their release date. There’s still such a thing as staying power, even in this minute-to-minute existence. — The Detour editors
Music from the Motion Picture I’m Not There (Columbia, 2007)
It’s not impossible to cover Bob Dylan; from bedroom hopefuls to cagey veterans, it happens all the time. But the folk icon shares his stature with his songbook, and by now the two are so entwined that to touch his music is to reach under that rumpled cowboy hat he’s been sporting lately and touch the wrinkled puss of Dylan himself. He’s on an unreal pedestal. And yet here’s director Todd Haynes, splitting his Dylan of I’m Not There into six personas of the same artist. It’s both bold, daring, and radical, but the experiments works as well on film as it does in music, as its soundtrack proves.With Calexico and an all-star band (including members of Sonic Youth and Wilco) serving as frequent backup musicians and a list of vocalists that includes Mark Lanegan (the predictable tanned-hide stretch of “Man in the Long Black Coat”), Karen O (”Highway 61 Revisited”), the Black Keys (”Wicked Messenger”), Stephen Malkmus (an incredible “Ballad of a Thin Man”), and Charlotte Gainsbourg (her “Just Like a Woman” might be 2007’s sexiest moment), not to mention the glower of Tom Verlaine, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s homespun folk-blues, and the usual velvety indie of Yo La Tengo, the participants in I’m Not There handle the Dylan Question with reverence, heart, and more than a little fun. The set works as a soundtrack. But it works better as a listening session, since the other side of the Dylan omnipresence is that you can always hear his version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” while Antony’s pained, pretty take on it makes it nearly new. — Johnny Loftus
[tags]Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, Todd Haynes, Antony, Sonic Youth, Wilco, Karen O[/tags]
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