Review: Bob Dylan looks back, again, on 'Fallen Angels'

With Bob Dylan's last album, 2015's Shadows In the Night, one of our most revered and enduringly cool singer/songwriters championed the increasingly undervalued art of interpretive singing, covering pre-rock standards delivered in the past by Frank Sinatra, among many others.

It would have been a momentous achievement for its statement alone, even if the results had been embarrassing, or meh — and they were anything but.

Investing his personal and creative experience into gems by Cy Coleman, Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein, Dylan gave us readings that were, if not pretty, profound; he served the material with reverence, wistfulness and wisdom while retaining the quirks and nuances that make him one of rock & roll's most distinctive voices to this day.

With the follow-up Fallen Angels, (* * * ½ out of four stars), out May 20, Dylan digs back into the treasure trove that is the American songbook. The focus here is generally on breezier fare than, say, Some Enchanted Evening or That Lucky Old Sun, to name two classics included on Shadows. This is not Dylan licking his wounds in the wee small hours of the morning, or losing himself in romantic rapture, for that matter.

There is a loose, playful quality to much of the singing here, and to the tracks, which Dylan produced under his nom de studio, Jack Frost. Polka Dots and Moonbeams begins as a dreamy, tangy instrumental, with the vocals drifting as if after a reverie, all grainy enchantment; That Old Black Magic is jazzier, the tempo sped up like a beating heart.

Even Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer's robustly bittersweet Skylark takes on an almost jaunty air, with animated acoustic guitar and whimsical viola heeding a gently buoyant pace.

But the lean, rootsy arrangements can also accommodate a distinct sense of melancholy. Subtly dissonant guitar chords introduce Young at Heart's promise of everlasting exuberance with a tinge of irony, and there is a pronounced sense of hope against hope both on a delicate Maybe You'll Be There and a more ominous Come Rain Or Come Shine.

Dylan's subdued ambivalence on the latter highlights the debt to the blues that he shares with composer Harold Arlen; it also lends a different kind of poignance to Mercer's pining lyric.

"Don't ever bet me/'Cause I'm gonna be true if you let me," Dylan sings, with implicit emphasis on the "if." Without raising his voice or adjusting his phrasing conspicuously, this pop vet, who turns 75 on May 24, captures how time can lower our expectations — though not, hopefully, our capacity for desire.

This is what a seasoned performer can do with words and music, whether his own or someone else's. Dylan deserves thanks for reminding us of that, again.

Playlist: Come Rain Or Come Shine, Skylark, On A Little Street In Singapore.