Another Form of Relief

One of the most enjoyable elements of music blogging is writing about the little bands or artists that wouldn’t usually get very much of an outlet. Sure, there’s mainstream stuff that’s worth writing about too which is obviously important, if only in terms of traffic levels. The most rewarding posts though tend to be the ones about a tiny band that plays to a room of 20 people, yet is still being read about and listened to worldwide, albeit in rather small numbers.

In that light, today we have up and coming Minnesota singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. While never really achieving any kind of success, the guy has been prolific, churning out no less than 33 albums this early on in his career. While some of those earliest works did pick up a little buzz, and involve some great work, I must confess that I haven’t kept up with much of his most recent output.

Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ is the first track from his upcoming album, and while not his strongest work, it does demonstrate that he is by no means out of ideas. The music has a slight Santana-like quality to it all, but it’s Dylan’s voice that is star here. Sounding grizzled beyond his years, it demonstrates a vocal talent rarely seen in musicians of today. Give it a few more years to get his sound just right and this guy could be something special.

Together Through Life will be released on April 28 via Columbia Records.

It hasn’t been this bad since my grandpa was a kid
He made it through – he never told us what he did

Has any line summed up the state of the world currently as much as that?

Of all of the bands I’ve had the pleasure of writing about on here, it’s The Young Republic that have developed the most of a band in that time. If I’m honest, I’d been a little apprehensive about the direction the band had been taking of late. Moving to Nashville from Boston and trading in the gentle indiepop of their earlier releases for a more classic rock, Americana influenced kind of sound was a risky gambit. While the results were largely very good, nothing really blew me away in the way those earliest songs did.

That changed when a couple of songs from the band’s upcoming release Balletesque dropped into my inbox though. The instrumentation on The Wolf suggests a band far larger than it’s current six member lineup. Indeed, the band never sounded this rich even as an eight piece. The real revelation here though is the songwriting of Julian Saporiti. Each verse manages to outdo the previous in both content and wordplay. This is certainly the closest he has come to not just writing like Dylan, but sounding like him too. Sure, it’s a lazy comparison given their Isis cover a while back, but we’re well beyond sounding like Belle and Sebastian at this point.

Balletesque will presumably be released in the nearish future.

Two and a half years after I originally wrote about The Young Republic on here, I finally got to see them live on Monday as they supported The Mountain Goats at ULU. Despite having a ton of Young Republic songs, it seems that the changes in the lineup have led to a new musical direction as they only played one song that I already know (the superb Modern Plays). The rest of the set was made up of far more country and folk influenced songs from their Idiot Grin EP, which isn’t really a bad thing. I’m just kind of disappointed I didn’t get to hear Girl From The Northern States. No matter though. The only other song I was familiar with was their cover for the night: Bob Dylan’s Isis. With a full band setup the song sounded superb, and while the recorded version below is rather more stripped down, it’s still a pretty damn good version of it.