More than an hour's worth of story songs played with easy swagger, The Wallflowers is one sweet debut – and some of the best Dylan in quite a while. Jakob Dylan, that is. Bob's youngest boy, a twenty-two-year-old singer-guitarist, fronts this L.A. quintet, and while it flourishes the psychic unity of a true band, he's clearly the visionary. That vision – panoramic, wry and allusive – inherits power from the style Jakob's dad perfected: a musical language rich enough that its latest dialects range from Indigo Girls' engaging folk to the biblical doomsaying of Nick Cave.

Jakob, of course, is the proper heir to his father's glory; still, it's a bit jolting how very like prime Bob The Wallflowers sounds at first. With a guitar-organ-piano attack echoing the Band and a production recalling The Basement Tapes, the album's rootsy sensibility, in this age of MIDI, seems almost classical in its purity – and the expert offhandedness of the young guns, especially keyboardist Rami Jaffee and guitarist Tobi Miller, rivals that of veterans. Jakob's vocals, too, grainy in tone and intriguingly phrased, bear a marked family resemblance.

Yet The Wallflowers soon takes on its own ripe life. As a lyricist, Dylan is riskier than most of his contemporaries – "Drainpipes are filled with dirty rain/And the leisure train/Is speeding in the diamond lane/With electricity shut off again/Leaving the nightlife only for the madmen," from "Hollywood," captures his imagistic daring. "After the Blackbird Sings" ("Now I seen this girl/She had hands full of lightning/She rolled it down to me/A Lolita smile, with/A thorn in her eyes/She spun the world/Up on the edge of a pearl/A carnivals girl/Up on a ferris wheel forever") epitomizes the sort of tender, quirky vignette he excels at.

Even more than wit, however, it's Dylan's generosity of spirit that's impressive. From the tragicomic "Side Walk Annie" and "Sugarfoot" to the wistful "Be Your Own Girl," "Honeybee" and "Shy of the Moon," he peoples his narratives with recognizable misfits, oddballs too human to scorn. He can rise to fury, too – "Hollywood" and "Somebody Else's Money" kick ass – but his ire seems clean, not condescending; again, his rendering of emotion appears very real.

And with their flannel shirts and bluesy riffs, their sound more rock than folk and their musicianship never less than fervent, the Wallflowers themselves come across as genuine. Theirs is music that wears well – it's wise beyond its years. (RS 644)

PAUL EVANS