The Wallflowers: Breach : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Jakob Dylan is becoming a master chronicler of things that fester: Tucked into the image-rich songs of the Wallflowers' third album, Breach, are accounts of romance that is not quite dead but on its painful last gasps, of desperate lovers carrying the torch long past the point of reason, and of sons being told, in a thousand little ways, that they'll never amount to anything.

You can tell that Dylan has been in the thick of this stuff. His songs are concerned with the residue left when the dust settles. "Nothing's hard as getting free from places I've already been," he sings wearily on the enigmatic hymn "I've Been Delivered," and you believe him. The song is one of those rambling seeker-on-the-path sojourns that Jakob's old man, Bob, does so well -- each couplet is a bit of sculpture that might not make immediate sense but that eventually has some abstract relationship to the whole. As the song builds, the banjo saunters in and sits down next to the brass, and the truths get heavier. "I've been the puppet/I've been the strings/I know the vacant face it brings," he sings. "I've Been Delivered" is the most intricate and songwriterly moment on Breach -- most of the time, Dylan does his best to frame more standard-issue observations (among the tropes: the wasteland, "incarcerated lovesick fools") in music descended from Springsteen, Tom Petty and other pillars of classic rock. Like the songs on the Wallflowers' 1996 breakthrough, Bringing Down the Horse, these tunes seem simple on the surface, an orderly procession of wordy verses followed by wide-load hooks. But there's always more going on: The sweeping Eagles-like arcs of "Hand Me Down" benefit from the wrenching chord changes and other subversive stuff Dylan and cronies stuff into the margins, while "Some Flowers Bloom Dead" masks its bitter message of regret in a resolutely sunny chorus.

It's in those little things that the Wallflowers show they're not exactly the same as they used to be. The band is more muscular, better suited to the task of bringing out the shades of gray or supporting the galvanizing refrains of "Sleepwalker" ("Cupid don't draw back your bow/Sam Cooke didn't know what I know"). Dylan has grown as a singer -- when he needs to, he can cop the grizzled nonchalance of an arena-rock veteran or echo Springsteen's somber Nebraska voice for one of the lumbering slow songs that dominate the tail end of the album. The slow stuff might be a bit ponderous, but the first six or seven songs manage a rare trick: They're incandescent enough to jump out at you on the radio, yet are steeped in a type of introspective inquiry that was once integral to rock & roll, and has nearly vanished. (RS 852)

TOM MOON