1967 was a year that saw a great deal of experimentation in rock music. Pink Floyd released Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which had a strong influence on the psychedelic turns on Sgt. Pepper and The Who Sell Out. Even Brian Wilson was flexing his muscles with his ambitious Smile project.

Bob Dylan, meanwhile, took back his acoustic guitar and focused on a more functional style of songwriting.

The drum set and bass guitar are the only artifacts of his trilogy of rock albums, and his flow of consciousness lyrics, already lessened on Blonde on Blonde, are entirely absent here, with Dylan instead focusing on packing significance into fewer words as he had been encouraged to do by poet Allen Ginsberg. The result is an album filled with songs with an average running time of three minutes that read like a sympathetic newspaper. And while the new frankness may have been an important turn in Dylan’s career, it doesn’t speak to the music as much, seeming disconnected to the notes and rhythms being played. This is especially notable in the story-telling songs, which sometimes coming across as entirely uneloquent (see: The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, where he sings “The moral of the story/the moral of this song/Is simply that one should never be/where one does not belong”). In other places, it allows Dylan a more focused language to express himself (I Am A Lonesome Hobo, All Along The Watchtower, Dear Landlord). But in the end, while this might be a good album, my favorite Bob Dylan will always be the rambling flow of consciousness rock rebel on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, which he in turn rebels against here with his brevity and plainness of speech.