Bob Dylan

Shadows In The Night

(Columbia)

So, Bob Dylan's much-touted Frank Sinatra album is not really a Frank Sinatra album after all. Yes, it features nothing but songs that Ol' Blue Eyes covered prominently himself, but it works better if thought of as Dylan's personal excavation of the Great American Songbook: Irving Berlin's What'll I Do and Rodgers & Hammerstein's Some Enchanted Evening are included while the Vegas razzmatazz of Fly Me To The Moon and New York, New York are not.

As an example of late-period Dylan, it shouldn't be bracketed with Tempest or any of those other creative bursts that have followed 1997's Time Out Of Mind. Shadows In The Night, like Christmas In The Heart, is an exercise in nostalgia that succeeds because it's genuine and never sentimental.

As with Johnny Cash's final works, it's all the better for falling short of slick crooning, as the broken instrument of Dylan's voice brings a weight of experience and an aged man's understanding of lost love to these lyrics.

Across the track list Dylan sustains a mood of romantic melancholy where his ground-down delivery is matched, on an emotional level, by subtle brass and plaintive pedal steel guitar. The arrangements remain stubbornly consistent from beginning to end, but they're atmospherically right on the button.

ALAN MORRISON