Bob Dylan - Empire Burlesque

Empire Burlesque is the twenty-third studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in June 1985 by Columbia Records.

Empire Burlesque puts the snarl back in Bob Dylan's music. This is not a case of mere pop-radio playability, this is something else: a blast of real rock & roll, funneled through a dense, roiling.

Empire Burlesque is nothing as straightforward as a simple return to rock & roll form for Dylan. True, the album's surging rockers, particularly the slunky funk of Trust Yourself, the steam-driven Seeing The Real You At Last, and the album's ravishing centerpiece, When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky reel the listener in with a muscular urgency that's been missing from much of Dylan's 80’s (read, born-again) work. The delightfully jivy Clean Cut Kid is Dylan's first direct reference to the Vietnam fiasco, and its sense of sorrow is admirably untainted by any hint of creeping antipacifist revisionism.

Those four songs, form the core of Empire Burlesque, are interweaved with six other very different tracks. One of them, the single Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love) is a lilting, midtempo tune with an archetypally Dylanesque harmonic structure. Three of the others, I'll Remember You, Never Gonna Be The Same Again, and Emotionally Yours are cast in the form of love ballads. And the album's two concluding cuts, Something's Burning, Baby and Dark Eyes are unblinking invocations of the Last Days

Dylan, for the first time in his career, produced the basic tracks himself (with a shifting group of players ranging from Mick Taylor, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare to such raucous recruits as Ron Wood, various members of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers and assorted East Coast horns).

This limited LP reissued on 180 gram audiophile vinyl with an insert is pressed in Europe.