Album review: Bob Dylan - Shadows Of The Night

There is a vogue among craggy music icons of the 1960s and 1970s to don a tuxedo — figuratively, if not literally — and revisit the sounds of their youth.

We’ve had Paul McCartney covering Irving Berlin, Beach Boy Brian Wilson re-imagining Gershwin and, to stretch the point, Bono’s much celebrated/lampooned duet with Frank Sinatra, from the early 1990s.

Now, Bob Dylan hitches himself to the bandwagon, with Shadows Of The Night, a collection of time-worn pre-rock standards.

All 10 numbers were previously recorded by Sinatra, though it seems unlikely Dylan looked to those readings as a touchstone.

If anything, the 73-year-old has taken on the mantle of an anti-Sinatra.

The twanging country-rock arrangements are in sharp distinction to Frank’s swooping, big-band style, while Dylan’s cookie-monster croak ensures the spectre of the Rat Pack never enters the studio.

As anyone who has attended a Dylan show across the past 25 years will testify, it is often difficult to tell when the old warhorse is in earnest and when he is having fun at the expense of his audience.

A similar ambivalence holds sway here. Dylan’s interpretations are not always reverential: if you are a devotee of cocktail-hour easy-listening, they may, in fact, feel sacrilegious.

Still, he is never flippant, even when imbuing ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ with a weird voodoo energy and when soaping down ‘You Are My Sunshine’ with stand-up bass and steel pedal, so that it evokes some of the twanging swagger of the version on the O Brother, Where Are Thou? soundtrack.

What’s most striking is the fuzzy glimmer the material emanates.

This is an album of remarkable warmth, as if Dylan had imbued it with the glow of childhood memories (which is when he would first have heard many of these songs).

Steeped in that smoking-crater croon, Shadows Of the Night is never pretty.

But it is heartfelt and light of foot — and, thus, a riposte to anyone tempted to dismiss latter-day Dylan as simply a curmudgeon in a pillbox hat.