On Oh Mercy, however, Dylan doesn’t follow the relatively straight forward lyrical hellfire of the opening with dense poetics and slinking instrumentation as he had done on Desire. Oh Mercy, instead, keeps pummeling the listener. Using the driving rhythm of “Everything is Broken”, the stylized production and keyboard texturing of “Most of the Time”, and the violent rasp that had become his voice, Dylan spits flames of wrath at the abuses of his world (abuses felt, abuses witnessed, and abuses imagined). If you’re not feeling sinister at the halfway mark of the album, “Man in the Long Black Coat”, you might be as dead as the character in the story.
And therein lies the greatness of Dylan’s latter period: as dark, brooding, and evil as Zimmy can sound (both lyrically and musically), he NEVER does it without righteous purpose. He is fully alive in mind, body, and spirit and you want to be alive with him; righting the wrongs that have stood since that first self-titled album back in 1962.
Needless to say, this album is highly recommended and a great place to start if you thought Dylan had just been a nostalgic touring act since the mid-’70s. (Continued from the previous post…)
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Been a fan since the mid 60’s and need to get a hold of some latter day work. To this day I still deeply enjoy “Balad of a Thinman!”