BOB DYLAN
Love and Theft
(Columbia Records)
****

Like Utah Phillips, Bob Dylan understands that the past didn't go anywhere; but unlike Phillips, or Jack Elliott, he never got hung up on spelling it out. On Love and Theft, his 43rd album, Dylan turns the past upside-down. Swiping the title from Eric Lott's 1993 history of blackface in America, he points the way to the unsettling nostalgia for roots music (the history of which is steeped in minstrelsy), with an understated depth that the heavy-handed Michelle Shocked lacked on her Arkansas Traveler project. Dylan loosely connects the dots between ragtime, country-blues, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, rockabilly, and the minstrel show, through casual asides and self-reference. His subject is love and a world gone wrong, but it has turned into a joke told in a clip joint by some huckster with a riverboat gambler's pencil-thin moustache. The lines are delivered in a voice blown out and not caring. Dylan has the insinuating rasp of the bluesman and the riddling, mysteried cadence of a true crank. On "High Water (For Charley Patton)" he revisits "Down in the Flood" three decades later, crashing the cultural party's levee, sweeping Big Joe Turner, Robert Johnson, and Charles Darwin into his twisted fuck with Delta blues. It's an audacious number delivered with a skewed Cheshire Cat grin. Turns out the past is as unknown and unpredictable as the future. NATE LIPPENS

THE PHANTOM LIMBS
Applied Ignorance
(Alternative Tentacles)
***

Hopeless, the Phantom Limbs' frontman, is a miserable guy. He hates old men ("Shut Up Old Man"). He hates your ugly mug ("Unhinged Face"). He likes to pour household items, like cooking oil and paint, on his head when he performs, turning himself into a sticky, screaming mess by night's end. Hopeless obviously grew up listening to the Cramps and the Misfits, and had a closet lined with various shades of black. The Phantom Limbs are like the damaged side of the Murder City Devils, what MCD might sound like after watching too many horror flicks and sniffing too much glue in the garage. The drums sound like the entire kit is crashing down on each song, the keyboards could've been ripped off from The Addams Family, and Hopeless vomits his distorted vocals. There's nothing clean about this band or its music, but that's just what makes the Limbs so morosely attractive. When you think your life is one fucked-up disaster, the Phantom Limbs have been through worse, and they have a brilliant way of singing about it. JENNIFER MAERZ

MERCURY REV
All Is Dream
(V2)
***1/2

Three years later, Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs still occupies a high ranking in whatever bullshit All-Time Top 10 list I may conjure. But while it was an amazing record, it nonetheless felt somehow incomplete, as if the band was still searching for its stride, not fully realizing its vision. Now comes All Is Dream, the follow-up, and if Mercury Rev has yet to hit full sprint, at least its members haven't stumbled. Big and pretty, full of mysterious songs about loss and love, All Is Dream advances the Rev's sound to a level where its members have officially graduated into full-blown musicianship, and it is easy to imagine each song having been meticulously detailed, note by note, before recording. Like the Flaming Lips, the Rev has tried to move past its noisy origins, in an attempt to keep music fresh for both the band and its listeners. All Is Dream lives up to the challenge. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

GOLDFRAPP
Felt Mountain (Re-release)
(Mute)
***

Elegant and seductive, Felt Mountain, the debut album from Goldfrapp, feels like the soundtrack to a lost James Bond film. From the haunting opening strains of "Lovely Head" through the last lingering notes of "Horse Tears," Goldfrapp has (re)created a sexy, slinky world that calls to mind high rollers and highballs. Singer Allison Goldfrapp possesses a voice guaranteed to make pulses race. It drapes itself over a symphonic background, like a mink stole on Grace Kelly's alabaster skin, gliding across the swell of strings like an expensive yacht on a moonlit Mediterranean evening. Make room on your CD shelves--somewhere between the icy glamour of Portishead, the fairy-dusted landscape of Björk, and the timeless sophistication of Julie London, Goldfrapp has fashioned a world all its own. BARBARA MITCHELL

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Poet: A Tribute to Townes Van Zandt
(Pedernales/Freefalls Records)
***

It seems as if Texas loner Townes Van Zandt, the state's unofficial poet laureate, has been gone for a long time--a longer time than we ever had him for. But that's partly because he seemed to be leaving, one foot out the door, the whole time he was alive. Van Zandt's 1972 album The Late Great Townes Van Zandt was a premature epitaph from a great songwriter who seemed ill at ease in his own skin and in the world at large. The other factor is that Van Zandt remained mostly unknown outside an adoring cult following, though he received the praise of fellow musicians. Tribute albums are notoriously shaky affairs, so it's a pleasure to report that Poet pays its dues alongside its homage. Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Guy Clark, as well as the Flatlanders, Lucinda Williams, and the Cowboy Junkies, have all covered Van Zandt's songs in the past, and many of the artists fostered longtime friendships with him. The naturalness and ease with which they approach the material disarms stymieing reverence in favor of an emotional depth that does the songs justice, conjuring up the existentialism that blew through Van Zandt's songs with equal parts pain and love. NATE LIPPENS