Locked in tight, out of rangePitchfork likened the Dept. of Eagles record to Sgt. Pepper - sonically, not qualitatively - but the Beatles I think I'd pick would be the minor-key cuts on The White Album ("Martha My Dear", "I'm So Tired") and side 2 of Abbey Road. Throw in the opening credits to Deadwood and last year's super-bizarro, oddly compelling Rise Above, The Dirty Projector's track-by-track reconstruction/reimagining of Black Flag's Damaged, and I think you start to get the picture. DoE is tied to Grizzly Bear through common member Daniel Rossen, and both bands share a common attic-core aesthetic (see also: Beach House), but where the latter's lauded 2006 effort, Yellow House, was maddeningly unfocused at points, In Ear Park is more committed to pop's notions of structure. Whether or not this constitutes an improvement depends on whether you prefer your medicine with a spoonful of sugar, or straight up.
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Jay Reatard's functionally-titled Matador Singles '08 is technically a compilation, collecting the limited-run vinyl-only singles the Tennessee punk savant has periodically dropped throughout the year since joining the top-tier NY indie label. Of course, this is a little chicken-and-egg: the comp was in the works from the start, so far from serving as a historical document, it listens more like the cogent, pre-conceived full-length it probably is. The Reatard who appears here is more restrained than the white squall terror leaping from the speakers on Blood Visions; indeed, though I recognized a few of the tracks from Reatard's, uh, frenetic performance at this year's Pitchfork Festival, the incarnations on record are closer to the late Exploding Hearts than Black Lips. The production is cleaner, providing more separation between the instruments and foregrounding Reatard's signature helium-imp squeal. The result is a set of effervescent songs with hooks that actually catch, like the jaunty "An Ugly Death", the New Pornography of "Always Wanting More", and Westerbergian elegy "No Time". Reatard is still mining a if-you-don't-like-this-one-well-here's-another vein, but the possibility that you won't like this one is virtually nonexistent.
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Bob Dylan's voice, once an instrument of revolution in and of itself, has been worn to a nubby croak by some combination of age, use, and American Spirits. No longer able to credibly play the accusatory oracle - that's a young man's game, anyhow - he is now America's foremost carnival barker, applying his gifts to the song forms that initially inspired him: blues and country-western. His last two LPs, 2001's masterful Love and Theft and 2006's somewhat-less-so Modern Times, seem like outright rejections, not only of modernity, but Dylan's own past pretense. This is not to say that he is a bitter artist: he has simply exercised his option and abandoned the Delphic mantle. At the time of 1969's puzzling Nashville Skyline, Dylan (who was not yet quite through being "Dylan") professed his desire to be a "song and dance man"; of late he has finally achieved that goal. The result is that Dylan has not retreated into his past but a past that he never inhabited, a past that he damn well may have invented for himself.
It is this period of retooling that Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 covers, and it is a testament to its subject's creative fecundity that its rich content belies the title's curatorial promise. Chockablock with alternate takes that seem less like left-overs and more like roads-not-taken (a Dylan trademark; see the Bootleg Series Vol. 2 version of "Idiot Wind"), stray soundtrack cuts (see the mournfully majestic "'Cross the Green Mountain", exiled to the Gods and Generals - ?! - OST), and live versions, Tell Tale Signs is a hodgepodge organized around the idea of Dylan as both irresistible force and immovable object. In turns he is wizened, mercurial, raunchy, valedictory, equally comfortable wearing the masks of comedy or tragedy. While it would be a mistake to peg Dylan as consistent - the liner notes to this set reference Dylan's own roundabout dismissal of his '80s output from the memoir Chronicles - the "trash" presented on Tell Tale Signs would be treasure to any of his remaining contemporaries, most of whom have been circling the drain of cultural irrelevance since the '60s and '70s. Indeed, it may well be treasure to the man himself; after all, this is the guy who evidently withheld the jaw-dropping "Blind Willie McTell" off 1983's Infidels on a whim, releasing it nearly a decade later on Bootleg Series Vol. 3. (The liners, by longtime Dylan scribe Larry "Ratso" Sloman, recount the author's profane outburst upon listening to the final, sequenced Infidels with Dylan and discovering that the song had been omitted; the singer's response: "Aw, Ratso, don't get so excited. It's just an album. I've made thirty of them.")
Eventually, perhaps, Dylan will dip too deep into the vault, and we'll hear the dregs. Yet, if Tell Tale Signs' title is to be believed - and its contents suggest as much - such an outcome is far from inevitable. This record is an achievement in its own right, a portrait of the artist as an old man traveling farther down a road that no one's quite gotten around to paving just yet. Probably just as well if no one ever does.
