"Paupers, Peasants, Princes & Kings: the Songs of Bob Dylan" (Doghouse)
By Kyle Wagner
Monday. Jun 19, 11:38 AM
Uninteresting and utterly unnecessary, except for one track.

There are two reasons for someone to listen to this album: 1) You are an obsessive fan of one of the bands included in the compilation and you will consume anything that band puts out, no matter how awful it is. 2) You want to hear Jim Ward’s version of “Lay Lady Lay,” which is quite good. If you’re a Bob Dylan fan, this collection of covers comes across as utterly unnecessary and easily dismissed. If you’re a fan of good music in general, this album is unadulterated pain condensed into 47 minutes. If you’re 16 and haven’t heard of Dylan and pick up this album based on the contributing bands, sadly it will probably send you scurrying into the woods, dismissing forevermore the works of a true songwriting genius. I understand that covers performed by current bands can provide an entrée into the work of artists that young people might not otherwise encounter, so they can serve a higher purpose. For example, I will sadly admit that the first time I heard “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was when my cousin played Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion II for me, so I know how the process works. Yet even that potential for exposure isn’t enough to justify some of the awful tracks on Paupers, Peasants, Princes & Kings: the Songs of Bob Dylan.

Jim Ward of Sparta manages to pull off what nobody else on this compilation can. He takes a Dylan song and adds a bit of his own flavor while retaining the integrity of the original, thus creating a track that is nuanced enough to feel fresh while still paying homage to the Dylan version. I’m not saying that this is the correct way to cover a song, but it does work in this instance. The ambiance of Ward’s version is similar to the original, but a bit more wide-open and warbling. Nashville Skyline, the album on which the song originally appeared, marked an odd vocal phase for Dylan in which he sounded unlike he had ever sounded before or has sounded since. Ward doesn’t try to mimic that style or do too much with his own vocals, which is refreshing considering how forced and affected so many of the other vocal performances on this album are. Instead, he delivers a coherent and updated version of a classic.

There are a few other tracks that are passable, but not necessarily good enough to stand on their own. “Simple Twist of Fate” performed by The Honorary Title is essentially just a sped-up version of the original with decent instrumentation. The prominent bass line used in the original is employed to good effect as an anchor for everything else, and the insertion of an organ into the mix is a welcome addition. “Tonight, I’ll Be Staying Here With You” performed by Limbeck is a dirty guitar-driven alt-country take that is listenable, but it sounds like any decent Southern bar band doing a Dylan cover, so it’s not particularly distinctive or praiseworthy.

For the most part, the bands on this album just take a Dylan song and perform it in a different style from the one in which it was first recorded. There’s not much originality involved in that process and the way it is done here doesn’t really add any new dimensions to the songs. With the covers on this album, you usually end up feeling like the lyrics could be anything written by anybody because they’re not the focus. Read Yellow do “If Not For You” as a noisecore song, and it sounds like any other the band would perform. The content of the lyrics doesn’t dictate the music or vice-versa. It’s as if it is just something to do because they were asked to contribute. One break from this one-dimensional style-swapping is P.O.S.’s hip-hop styled version of “All Along the Watchtower,” in which they use the chorus from the original song but substitute their own rhymes for the normal verses. The new material is not particularly compelling or impactful – in fact, it sounds like the rapped parts of Linkin Park songs in which all the same syllables are stressed throughout the entire delivery, and that’s not a good thing – but at least they attempted to make the song their own by adding something to it (if you can’t tell already, I’m grasping for positive things on which to comment because the bad parts of this album far outweigh the good).

Gatsby’s American Dream contribute a ridiculously awful, cringe-inducing version of “Don’t Think Twice, it’s All Right.” Purposefully singing out of key over a programmed beat does not make you creative. It’s as if Nic Newsham decided to perform a bad impersonation of Connor Oberst doing an impersonation of Dylan with some distracting noise in the background. It’s embarrassing, the antithesis of “edgy,” and the apotheosis of a poseur rendition. Not to be outdone, Panama Jack disembowel all of the humor from “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met)” and instead substitute a bit of alternating screaming and talking of the lyrics over guitar playing that sounds as if it were performed by a 12 year-old. Other gems include Say Anything starting with some bland “ba, ba, ba”s before launching into what sounds like a bad Ramones cover band performing “The Man in Me,” and Down To Earth Approach delivering a whiny, nasally, pop punk version of “My Back Pages” that feels as if it belongs on the soundtrack for some lame movie that tries to capture the zeitgeist of the current teenage crowd. These are four shining examples of why this album is simply unnecessary. Dylan himself has been constantly reworking his own songs over the years, changing lyrics, destroying and rebuilding melodies, and performing them in different styles with mixed results. A decent amount of these reworked tunes have been far less than compelling, but even the worst ones are usually better than what this album has to offer.

One good track out of 13. Just buy a Dylan album, even one of the awful ones like Empire Burlesque, and you will get much more enjoyment than this compendium of crummy covers can provide.
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Kyle Wagner

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