(Columbia)
Coming off the heels of his best album, , Bob Dylan enlisted a seemingly endless list of random musicians to contribute to his next effort, . The tour resulting from this, the Rolling Thunder Revue, was a ragtag endeavor that has received little documentation over the years, with the only live performances existing in Dylan's obscure, four-hour movie \Renaldo and Clara."" Despite all this distraction, captures the artist at the peak of his work, radically reinventing old tunes while honing the then-new tracks off of .
Unlike the previous live reissue, , this spans several different concerts, with the producers faithfully recreating what a show might have sounded like, choosing the ones with the best sound or performances.
Dylan tears through his new songs with a tremendous energy--his backup singers can't even keep up on an impassioned ""Hurricane""--and the older songs get reinvented. ""Tangled Up In Blue,"" ""Simple Twist of Fate"" and especially ""Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You"" face radical reworking of the lyrics, showing Dylan refining themes or just trying to keep himself interested in the songs, some of which were 12 years old at this point.
Surprisingly strong both musically and lyrically in the face of the constant reinvention and experimentation that he was taking part of at the time, offers an heretofore unseen glimpse of Dylan, redefining his genius yet again.
