Seeing Things : Jakob Dylan : Review : Rolling Stone

Jakob Dylan has big boots of Spanish leather to fill. "Evil Is Alive and Well," the opener of his first solo album, finds him singing, "May be in a palace, it may be in the streets/May be here among us on a crowded beach. . . . But evil is alive and well." He's echoing his father Bob's 1979 hit "Gotta Serve Somebody": "You might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread/You may be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-size bed/But you're gonna have to serve somebody." Trying to live down his daddy's legend, Jakob enlists producer Rick Rubin, who captured the essence of another icon, Johnny Cash, in a series of stripped-down folk albums. But Jakob doesn't have the lyrical gift to augment these spare songs, and tracks like "Everybody Pays As They Go" — little more than acoustic guitar and vocals — could have benefited from the muscular guitars and soulful organ of his band, the Wallflowers. There are some high points — the pretty ballad "On Up the Mountain" and the feel-good pop song "Something Good This Way Comes" — but he needs more than competent folk rock to be taken seriously on his own terms.