Album review: Jakob Dylan

JAKOB DYLAN: SEEING THINGS
***
COLUMBIA, £9.99

GOING into the family business can be a blessing and a curse at the best of times, but when your old man is an internationally established musician there is really no hope of escaping comparison when you pick up a guitar, or a set of drumsticks or even a kazoo. On the other hand, a well-kent surname is a useful way to stand out in a crowd of musical hopefuls.

Liam Finn, son of Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, must be getting used to that now, as he touts his debut album and looks forward to the day when his music can be evaluated on its own terms. It can happen – Rufus and Martha Wainwright have arguably surpassed the fame of their parents, Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, while Jeff Buckley's music is more widely lionised than the cult recordings of his father, Tim.

But you've got to feel for Jakob Dylan, youngest son of the venerable Bob. Regardless of the recognition factor, it must have been daunting going into the family trade knowing that your father had pretty much written the job description.

Dylan Jr has actually been chipping away industriously at the coalface for the past 18 years or so, under cover of his band The Wallbirds, who are a big, Grammy-winning deal in the States. However, with some five albums under their belt, the band are currently in hiatus and their frontman, now in his late 30s and a father of four himself, has emerged from behind the anonymous band moniker to use his own culturally-loaded name for his first solo offering.

Divested of his rock sidemen, Dylan has produced a spare, acoustic album in the troubadour tradition. His father's influence is there, but only in so far as it seems to be inescapable for every guitar-toting singer/songwriter in the western world.

Dylan the younger actually cites the wonderful roots musician and producer T Bone Burnett, with whom he first toured as a solo artist, as the catalyst for his going it alone.

The other key player in Seeing Things is heavyweight producer and now Columbia label head Rick Rubin who, in the wake of his affecting work with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, appears to have shifted his focus entirely on to bare bones recordings which keep the song squarely in the foreground.

Dylan's songs, such as they are, are well served by this approach, but the real winner is his voice, which has an Elvis Costello/Tom Petty-like cry in its timbre. The downside is he struggles to shift out of melancholy gear, even when delivering a positive lyric, such as his simple, rootsy celebration of the working man on All Day And All Night, which is sung without much spirit.

Likewise, Something Good This Way Comes, on which he sounds like he can barely muster the lazy contentment and optimism elicited by the simple pleasures he extols ("grasshopper jump in the road, kids they're all running home, cos they know something good this way comes"). This is the kind of warm homeliness which Ron Sexsmith can not only radiate in his sleep, but also sprinkle with an unquantifiable magic.

However, Dylan Jr is an eloquent enough lyricist, not only capable of painting a plaintively observed picture – as on Will It Grow, a rueful Woody Guthriesque paean to the land rounded out with soulful harmonies – but also able to approach political material from an angle.

Everybody Pays As They Go is a ruminative number which packs all it needs to say into that title, but the protest strum of Evil Is Alive And Well is more open to interpretation. "Maybe has a pitchfork, maybe has a tail … it's ragged and fat, it's hungry as hell … maybe in a palace, maybe on the streets, maybe here among us on a crowded beach" drawls Dylan. Is he taking predictable aim at his country's outgoing administration? Or stoking right-wing paranoia? Or satirising the superpower's perennial obsession with a lethal enemy?

"I know that soldiers are not paid to think, but something is making us sick," he declares on Valley Of The Low Sun. But he remains mercurial on the lament War Is Kind ("daughter, war is safe when you are far away") and on the fatalistic hunter/soldier's tale This End Of The Telescope which warns "tomorrow will come if she can … this genie is too angry to go back into the bottle again".

Anyway, it's done now. He's put his name to an album. The main impediment for this Dylan is that, although there is food for thought and a impeccably conceived sound on individual tracks, as a whole, Seeing Things is musically a little too samey and unassuming to be as striking as that moniker on the sleeve.