For all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan’s most consistently brilliant set of songs in years: the die-hards can spend months unravelling the knottier lyrics, but you don’t need a PhD in Dylanology to appreciate its singular quality and power.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is the work of a man in love with language and philosophy, and, at 79, he continues to take the pulse of the zeitgeist with unerring precision.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is a magical, threatening and ultimately challenging metaphysical exhibition of a writer’s limitless talent riding roughshod over convention.
Rough and Rowdy Ways stands unimpeachably among the very best albums of Dylan’s six decade career.
More pertinently, Rough and Rowdy Ways is a clear reflection of America’s jagged landscape — one of romance and mystery, creativity and fortune, protestations and politicking, conquests and colonialism. It makes for an exquisite, haunting listen.
On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan is exploring terrain nobody else has reached before—yet he just keeps pushing on into the future.
An artist haunted by the prospect of his passing while still facing down new challenges, Bob Dylan remains above all else a student of America.
Rough and Rowdy Ways continues the gravity-defying trajectory of Dylan's work during the past two decades to be considered among the finest albums of the creative renaissance that began with 1997's Time Out of Mind.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is the ambitious opus we didn't think he'd return to after close to a decade of elegantly phoning it in.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is akin to transformational albums such as Love and Theft, and Slow Train Coming. It's a portrait of the artist in winter who remains vital and enigmatic. At nearly 80, Dylan's pen and guitar case still hold plenty of magic.
The music is almost simple, mostly acoustic with thick blues stuffed in every wrinkle. Dylan doesn’t sing. It’s poetic delivery that plants every sentence firmly in the ground. Each will sprout, spreading new roots in the world of Dylan discovery as we break down his every breath and assign it meaning. Each song needs annotation.
Over 10 tracks, he seeds Rough and Rowdy Ways with deep musical and lyrical erudition, witticisms and considerable panache.
If Rough and Rowdy Ways is his valedictory statement to us, it's certainly in keeping with his traditionalist spirit.
Bob Dylan’s 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, finds the aging Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter looking to the past and settling comfortably there both in terms of sound and subject matter.
You get a rugged-yet-elegant Dylan—once again reinvented.
If you're not already a fan of Bob Dylan's 21st century output, Rough and Rowdy Ways probably won't do much to change that.
#1 | / | MOJO |
#1 | / | Uncut |
#3 | / | Gothamist |
#3 | / | Spectrum Culture |
#3 | / | Variety: Chris Willman |
#3 | / | Vulture |
#4 | / | Entertainment Weekly |
#4 | / | Louder Than War |
#4 | / | Rolling Stone |
#4 | / | The Wire |