Ranked #16 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks Includes "Tangled Up In Blue," "Simple Twist of Fate," "Idiot Wind," and "Buckets of Rain"

Experience Presence, Immediacy, Naturalness, and Realism in Spades: Mobile Fidelity's Hybrid SACD Does This 1975 Landmark Justice

Bob Dylan was at several crossroads in the mid-1970s. Artistically, he was largely written off as being past his prime. Emotionally, he was suffering through a painful divorce from his then-wife Sara Lowndes. Creatively, he appeared at a stalemate, his previous decade's unprecedented run of transformational brilliance finished. Then came Blood on the Tracks.

A start-to-finish cycle that documents a lover's pursuit of, entanglement with, and loss of a woman, the bracingly intimate 1975 effort remains one of the most encompassing break-up albums ever made and ranks as the most personal statement of the Bard's career. To hear it is to experience the agony, frustration, trauma, highs, lows, confusion, sadness, and, ultimately, redemption associated with intimate relationships gone astray.

Dylan maintains it's a work of fiction, but it's evident close-vested autobiographical premise is what helps make it universal: It's the icon singing through tears, going out of his mind, battling hallowing emptiness, firing shots across the bow, and accepting culpability. It is, in short, a consummate expression of love's darker sides and the consequences of what happens when dreams unravel.

Mastered from the original master tapes, Mobile Fidelity's hybrid SACD presents the solo acoustic and band-supported songs with engaging clarity, dynamics, presence, immediacy, spaciousness, and balance. It shines a high-powered light on the fluid vocal phrasing, timbral shifts, functional rhythms, and inward-looking strumming that contribute to every song here serving as a wound-exposing confessional.

For all the melancholic pain, unresolved questions, shattered memories, wasted times, unrequited dialogs, and weary regret within it, Blood on the Tracks remains as daring as it is reflective. Rather than follow for a monotone caustic vibe, its songs are even-keeled, mellow, and occasionally, even peaceful. Dignity, honor, poignancy, and fairness – all traits uncommon in any situation in which partners dissolve histories, change hearts, and attribute blame – instill the record with an eerie equilibrium.

Throughout, tunes come on and proceed as if they could continue forever. Dylan spins poetic verses amid finely tied knots of acoustic notes, chords, and fills. Backed by Tony Brown's flexible albeit subtle bass, Buddy Cage's country-streaked pedal-steel guitar, and Paul Griffin's soul-baring organ – an instrument used to shadow, tuckpoint, and illuminate here as effectively as any time in rock history – Dylan pours soulful emotion, open his veins, and bleeds.

"Until now, the best digital version was an expensive and now out-of-print blu-Spec CD from Sony Japan. This excellent mastering by Mobile Fidelity's Rob LoVerde and Shawn Britton resolves a little more detail and texture than the blu-Spec CD."
– Hi-Fi+