ARTS The Michigan Daily - Friday, September 9, 2005 - 9 DON'T LOOK BACK SOUNDTRACK TO SCORSESE DOCUMENTARY TRACES BOB DYLAN's EARLY CREATIVE EVOLUTION By Alexandra Jones Daily Arts Editor MUSIC REVIEW If there were an encyclopedia of late 20th century popular music - a definitive compendium of artists, albums, genres, movements, slang, scenes, debuts, Founding members of the Dave Matthews Fan Club. Go Dave! Black Dice expand "sound on new LP By Uoyd Cargo Daily Arts Writer Black Dice's Broken Ear Record is the death knell of the neo-noise renaissance, but that might not be such a terrible thing. Noise peaked creatively in '02 with Black Dice's Black Dice own masterpiece Broken Ear Record Beaches & Can- DFA yons, Wolf Eyes' Slicer and Dread and the discovery of Lightning Bolt's Ride the Skies. The genre peaked cultur- ally last year when Wolf Eyes released Burned Mind on mega-indie label Sub Pop and subsequently appeared on the cover of Wire magazine. Predictably, this underground movement led more established bands to incorporate aspects of noise into their more straightforward work. When bands like Wilco brought noise to the Starbucks and NPR crowd, it irreparably damaged noise's hipster credibility. Now Black Dice, a forerun- ner of the genre's improbable surge in popularity, is going the way of Animal Collective and becoming gradually more pastoral and less and less apocalyptic. Interestingly enough, all of this bodes well for Black Dice on Broken Ear Record. Rather than growing stagnant, the band has transformed from druggy Merzbow imitators to Autechre with aggression. Boredoms' influence is also becoming more and more apparent, as demonstrated by the almost dance- able groove that kicks off album opener "Snarly Yow." The song is paired with "Smiling Off" at the outset of Broken Ear Record; at a combined 18 minutes, they represent the bulk of the album - both sonically and in length. Less face-melting and abrasive than prior efforts, both display Black Dice's more efficient approach to destroying dorm room speakers. Here, less noise is more devastating. Following those scaled back yet still visceral tracks, the album turns it down yet another notch with the starkly sparse "Heavy Manners." It's a make-it-or-break -it moment for the album, but Black Dice pulls off the change of pace infinitely bet- ter than they did with 2004's inconsistent Creature Comforts. The band trudges on with two more hypnotic jams before end- ing the album with their most accessible song to date. The album's- closer, "Motorcycle," is perhaps a promising glimpse at the direction Black Dice will take in the future. The four-on-the-floor beat and the uncharacteristically optimistic guitar riff display the sort of varied sentiment that lesser noise bands never even attempt. But, the band wisely let the album ride out with a fractured rat-ta-tat of drums and bass, proving that while they can do subtle and happy, they're still the best there is at rupturing eardrums. ODs, legends and all the other little details that make music worth loving - the listing for "bootleg" would read something like: "A recording illicitly pro- duced, bought or sold. See also: Dylan, Bob." No other artist, not The Bea- tles or the Stones or Michael Jackson or the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home - The Soundtrack Columbia/Legacy "Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything." has attracted fans and followers of unofficial record- ings in comparable quantity or fervor as Bob Dylan. No other artist has presented the same Delphian combination of mystery, wisdom, directness and inspiration that defines Dylan's musical persona; to fully understand him as an artist is as impossible a task as assembling a complete collection of Dylan's full - that is to say unofficial - catalog. Ever since Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, fans have collected and traded unofficial recordings by the enigmatic (and prolific) artist. Tapes include everything from home recordings to live shows to interviews to demos to outtakes to alternate versions. For decades, bootleg recordings were the domain of Dylan's most rabid fans, an elite group - some of whom view collecting the artist's unofficial record- ings as a spiritual more than musical pastime. That's how things were until '91, when Dylan's longtime label, Columbia, released The Bootleg Series: Voss. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased), a three-disc collection of non-album tracks that spanned Dylan's career from Greenwich Village coffeehouses, civil rights rallies, electric inspiration, motorcycle accidents through to the supposed "third comeback" and the inception of the Never-Ending Tour in the late '80s. Since then, some of the most historic performanc- es of Dylan's career have been released; live record- ings from '75's Rolling Thunder Revue tour, '64's Carnegie Hall performance that marked the apex of Dylan's acoustic career and the essential '66 Free Trade Hall show during which a wild-haired Dylan, backed electrically by touring band The Hawks, was denounced by a dissatisfied folkie as "Judas!" The most recent installment in the series, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home - The Soundtrack, doesn't capture the music made on one evening or one tour; this release is meant to accom- pany the story of Dylan's ascension as a controver- sial folk poet and his controversial "second coming" as the new musical landscape's electric messiah, which is shown in the upcoming Martin Scorsese- directed documentary of the same name, airing Sept. 26 and 27 on PBS. No. Direction Home's first disc is comprised mostly of early and live recordings from Dylan's acoustic years, including what most believe to be.the first recording of his music in exis- tence (opener "When I Got-Troubles," whose faded, crackly quality and bluesy simplicity is reminis- cent of selections from the Anthology of American Folk Music, which may have had a hand in inspir- ing it). Dylan's fascination with folk legend Woody Guthrie shows on recordings of "This Land Is Your Land" and one of only two self-penned songs on his first album, "Song to Woody." These tracks exhibit Dylan's fascinating experimentation with persona early in his career; on "Troubles" and the home recording of "Rambler, Gambler," Dylan's voice is youthful, almost sweet; he sounds like a barefoot Appalachian boy whose only contact with the outside world comes from fuzzy transmissions of blues and country radio shows from the Tennessee Valley. By the time he recorded "Song to Woody" and "Dink's Song," Dylan's voice had aged and hardened to that familiar nasal rasp of gravel and soul that character- izes the folk classics ("Man of Constant Sorrow"), social commentary ("Blowin' in the Wind," "Mas- ters of War") and pre-psychedelic epic visions ("Mr. Tambourine Man") that made the singer/songwriter from Minnesota into a cultural vanguard. No Direction Home's second disc kicks off with an alternate take of the delicate, rhapsodic "She Belongs to Me," one last reminder of Dylan's first public identity. But in between this and the next track we hear an announcer's voice:, "Ladies and gentle- men ... the person who's going to come up now ... has a limited amount of time ... his name ... is Bob Dylan!" Momentary applause, and then - in the flash of a second - the world changes as we hear Courtesy of Columoia the rough preliminary twangs of "Maggie's Farm" as performed at the '65 Newport Folk Festival. Accord- ing to legend, the raucous electric performance so affronted festival attendees that pandemonium broke out; the audience booed, and musician Pete Seeger supposedly went after the band's cables with a hatch- et. The song was a response to fans' initial rejection of Dylan's electric experimentation; the line "I try my best to be just like I am/ But everybody wants you to be just like them," is a combined slap in the face and "fuck you" to those who wanted to hold Dylan back. This is the definitive moment in the most important era of Dylan's career; regardless of Scorsese, Columbia could have released this single recording and fans would have understood. The rest of disc two takes listeners through 1966 with alternate takes and live versions of songs from the powerful Highway 61 Revisited and the career- defining Blonde on Blonde. Lyrically, these outtakes don't differ much from the album cuts, but the musi- cal framework is often different. The bluesy, lan- guorous album version of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" featured twangy, fast-paced music, and on this version of "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat," organ slinks beneath Dylan spitting out slow, innuendo-heavy lyrics. The aim here is not to rehash Dylan's music "greatest hits"-style, but to show the hours of experimentation and activity that went into producing two of the most important rock albums ever recorded. No Direction Home comes at a time in Dylan's career at which he has transcended the persona of plainspoken protest singer, enigmatic rock- poet, ghost-faced fortune teller; now he's the larger-than-life legend, the weathered old musi- cian he tried so hard to sound like when he was 20. It feels a bit like a retrospective, a prema- ture look back at Dylan during his most creative period. But if we have faith in him - and we do - we know that this is just more hero worship or canonization; and that the era of Bob Dylan as living legend isn't over. DAILY ARTS. WE HAVE SKI MASKS* COME TO OUR MASS MEETING SUNDAY AT 5 P.M. t Cordially invites Michigan University Juniors and Seniors to a presentation and reception On Monday, September 12th, 2005 Davidson Hall 5:00PM Career Analyst Interviews: Wednesday, October 19t", 2005 Summer Analyst Interviews: Monday, January 23rd, 2006 Seniors interested in interviewing for Analyst positions in our Investment Banking Group should submit resumes and cover letters through MTRAK by September 29th For additional information please contact: Shannon Sullivan: (212) 632-6244