HYLI Vol. LXXIII - Bob Dylan (again) and Insomnium (again)
We're revisiting some artists that we tried (and failed) to get the other to like last year: Andy sends Patrick a different Insomnium record and Patrick sends Andy one of Bob Dylan's weird ones
This is a music newsletter, but if you know anything about Patrick or me outside of this medium, you'll know that we love movies. We all acknowledge that Tom Cruise saved cinema (Patrick: quit bringing group text bits to the newsletter) (Andy: bits are for the people), and enabled Nolan and Gerwig to Bring Us Back To The Movies. Last Friday, we had the much-anticipated "Oppenheimer - Barbie" double-feature release. I believe Patrick and I both took some PTO to plant ourselves in the movie theater and enjoy the cinema experience. To keep it brief, both movies are very good. In my opinion, one is better than the other. I highly recommend seeing both movies. However, it's not necessary to buy a branded T-shirt to do so.
Bob Dylan - Time Out Of Mind
Patrick: So, we’ve been enjoying doing more “conceptual” weeks for HYLI, breaking free from the original concept of just picking records from our personal canons. To me, the idea of a “re-do” seemed fun: picking one artist from last year that the other disliked and seeing if something else from that artist worked better. Honestly, Bob Dylan is just a top 5 artist ever for me and hearing Andy talk some hot shit on my second-favorite album ever felt like dogshit. So, I wanted to try something else and see if he liked it. Andy hates folk (Andy: yup). He hates acoustic guitars (Andy: they aren’t great). He loves weird vocals that aren’t traditionally good and he likes weirdo experimentation. So, I decided to throw Andy Time Out of Mind. I don’t love the 90s-00s output from Bob as much as others like, say, Rolling Stone Magazine, but it is still pretty decently cool. I heard “Love Sick” first from a cover by the White Stripes. Jack White has covered several Dylan songs, and a lot of them are from this era, and that makes sense to me. “Love Sick,” and the album as a whole, feature Bob as basically a blues singer, but with some additional freak thrown into it.
I saw Bob live in 2018 and he played a few songs off of this record, namely “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” and “Cold Irons Bound.” The former is my favorite song here. Dude sounds like he’s gargling rocks but the melody of the chorus is soooo strong that it doesn’t matter. What a fucking hook. Goddamn gorgeous beautiful song. Andy mentioned during the Clutch discussion that he enjoys the blues, a shocking development (Andy: I’m full of surprises), and “Cold Irons Bound” feels like Dylan leaning on all the blues singers of the 30s and 40s that The Rolling Stones, Hendrix, Clapton, etc. etc. pulled from but in a way that he himself never really did in his classic period when he was their peer. I absolutely love this sound from him.
The focal song here is “Make You Feel My Love.” To be honest with ya, I’ve listened to this album somewhere between 50-100 times in my life and it took until this week for me to realize it’s a Bobby D original. I thought for sure it was like a standard or a track from a contemporary that Bob covered, as well as seemingly every pop singer last decade. To find out that a song I’d hear at the mall with either an Adele or a Kelly Clarkson singing it was a Dylan original left me slackjawed a bit. So sick. Our dude is the GOAT songwriter, my mind cannot be changed. I hope Andy likes this. If he doesn’t, he’s fucked and is missing out on one of the GOATs. His loss.
Andy: The first time I listened to Bob Dylan for this newsletter, I said that I "never really understood why so many people considered him a GOAT songwriter, but I absolutely get it now, even if it's not really for me." I still understand why people think he's the GOAT songwriter, and this record was decidedly much more to my liking. Pat definitely had this in mind when suggesting the theme this week, and as usual, he pretty much nailed it (Patrick: wow thanks!).
Dylan's vocals are outrageous on this record. Half the time, he sounds like my impersonation of Da Coach O (Patrick: explaining a college football cult figure to our audience isn’t really worth it to me). This album definitely feels more bluesy than Blonde on Blonde did. I wanted to listen to Blonde on Blonde a few more times for a more apt comparison, but I got a stomach bug from my youngest daughter, so... shit happens. Dylan is fully into sad-bastard vibes here, and I loved it. An overall melancholic feel hangs over most of the album (Patrick: he wrote most of these songs while suffering from a lung infection, which led to a heart infection, and then dude just kept on living another 20+ years). "Cold Irons Bound" is one motherfucker of a song. "Million Miles" rules. "Make You Feel My Love" shows up and provides a glimmer of hope amidst his angsty crooning.
You could definitely trim this album by 20-30 minutes and make it even better. "Highlands" is pretty good, but I'm worn out by the time it comes up. I don't think the best albums need to be over an hour long. But that might be my biggest complaint here? The length? I think that's it. I will never dive into Dylan’s entire discography (Patrick: i sighed but, also, respect). There is too much music there and I’m sure most of it won’t connect with me. This really did though. In 2024 we can return again to Dylan, maybe in a playlist form. We can make it an annual thing. I Loved It (Patrick: let’s gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo).
Insomnium - Winter’s Gate
Andy: With this week's theme, Patrick was mean to me (what else is new?), because I didn't immediately have a band in mind for the prompt. First off, he either loves the albums I pick (because I am great at this) or he hates the band’s best album (because he is an idiot). Listen, if you hate Septicflesh or Necrophagist, a different album isn’t going to change that for you. These bands aren’t like Bob Dylan; they don’t have… 40 studio albums (jesus christ man) that experience a multitude of tonal shifts. They’re metal bands that play metal. If you don’t like their metal, you're probably not going to like any album.
I was able to finally settle on Insomnium, under the expectation that he will have the exact same qualms with this record as he did with their best record, Above The Weeping World. His note was, "I prefer death metal with some semblance of melody, but also a fair share of experimentation." Winter’s Gate is, by all means, very much an Insomnium record, but I believe satisfies his biggest complaint. The album is a single 40-minute track that they broke down into seven parts, so people on streaming services wouldn’t be scared and piss their pants (Patrick: honestly i felt a little dribble of urine seeing the seven “parts”). It is a concept album about a group of Vikings (Patrick: aren’t they all) on a quest to discover a new island to the west of Ireland, even though a big-ass winter storm is going to mess them up. Cool. It is a bit more experimental, and they play a bit more with clean vocals. There are some fun parts in this record where they veer off their usual path a bit - but, all in all, it is still very much an Insomnium album. It is grade-A melodic death metal. "Part 2" has a great little metalcore riff, and "Part 3" features a fun, slowed-down, post-rock-inspired section. There are more solos than usual. Niilo Sevänen continues to be, without question, the best melo-death vocalist around. His growls are just unmatched for me personally, and he sounds exactly like that live... it's incredible.
I’m still expecting Patrick to just copy and paste his response from the previous time we did Insomnium because his peewee little brain still hasn’t picked up on the intricacies of metal over the last two years (Patrick: fuck off) but, who knows, I’m often wrong so maybe I’m wrong about this. Hope You Like It!
Patrick: I went back to look at my comments from the last time we did Insomnium because of how Andy reacted. Guess what, he is being a big fucking baby yet again. I was overwhelmingly positive! I don’t even know why he picked this band. I said I liked everything a lot! There were melodies, there was some shredding, also the vocals were great and the drums felt real! Was it a little bit by the book / did it play it safe a bit? Sure, but I still liked it. I didn’t soil my pants like Andy did over Bob Dylan lol.
Honestly, I liked Winter’s Gate more than Above the Weeping World. Is it a perfect record or the best from this newsletter? No, but it’s definitely solidly in the top half. Like Andy said, the vocals in this are really, really good and the selling point here. It’s a little difficult to focus on specific parts of this album given, as Andy pointed out, it’s basically a single-track album broken into multiple songs to game the system. I think I liked “Pt. 3” the best - I liked the heavier but slower section, recalling Russian Circles at times. “Pt. 7” also has all the epic kind of qualities that “uplifting,” for lack of a better word, metal usually puts in the closing of an album. I really liked this and, while I said I didn’t know how often I would come back to Above the Weeping World (maybe the only “negative” thing I said), I could definitely see myself coming back to Winter’s Gate quite a bit. We love a concept around these parts. I Liked It.