The curse of being Bob Dylan’s progeny is that, once you proclaim yourself a singer-songwriter, you will ultimately be held up in the glare of that bright light that is your father.  Jakob Dylan, who has helmed The Wallflowers to a satisfying measure of success, has decided to test those frighteningly steaming waters in his first solo outing, Seeing Things.  A tough job for most critics is that they must disentangle themselves from the memory of Bob Dylan to ruminate on this release.  And so it begins…

Seeing Things is a reflection of the world; its wars, its evil; its emptiness.  Recorded in simple, stripped down acoustics, a trait of producer Rick Rubin, the songs speak deeply and convincingly.  But in all fairness, parts of Seeing Things is far-reaching while some parts fail to bare teeth.

The album opens with “Evil is Alive and Well,” a missive on how closely we live with immorality and misfortune.  On “War is Kind,” Dylan mocks the pro-war constituency who insist that war is necessary by involving us in a sarcasm of word-play (“…war is kind, of like hell…”, and “…war is safe, where you are far away…”).

Simpler tracks like “All Day and All Night,” looks at the hard-work ethics of the average man and the take-all mindset of their employers, a la Springsteen.  All in all, Seeing Things is an album that shows promise.  The skill set is there.  While I like the whole, I couldn’t help but feel that there is more to Jakob Dylan than I’m hearing here, especially when you can hear the echoes of it reverberating off the walls of these songs.

The sun has not yet set on Jakob Dylan.