With the Never-Ending Tour grinding to a halt due to the COVID-19 lockdowns,
Bob Dylan
staged a startling original concert in
Shadow Kingdom
, a live-in-the-studio show captured in a noir-ish black & white film. Stripped of those striking visuals on this 2023 album -- released two years after the film aired for a brief time on the internet -- the music sounds remarkable, a genuine reimagination of
Dylan
's warhorses. Despite arriving a year after the acclaimed
Rough & Rowdy Ways
, this collection earns its subtitle of "The Early Songs of Bob Dylan": with the exception of "What Was It You Wanted," which debuted on 1989's
Oh Mercy
, and the instrumental coda "Sierra's Theme," all these songs date from the '60s and early '70s. The key to
is that he's not performing any of these songs like he did at the time they were written. They're given inventive arrangements that are right in the vein of the pan-American roadhouse music he's been making since the dawn of the 21st century: they're blues and rockabilly, they're soul and country, they're standards meant to be crooned in a saloon.
plays with his vocal phrasing, relying on all the tricks he learned cutting record after record of tunes associated with
Frank Sinatra
. The result is surprising and singular, revealing new twists in songs that seemed to be set in stone decades ago. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine