Review: Jakob Dylan at the Wiltern

For much of the supernaturally gripping material on his exceptional new Women + Country album deals with the shadowy parts of life, ghosts and vacated homes and hearts.

Those songs served as the anchor for what Dylan described as his first show in Los Angeles proper in eight years, for which he was joined by singers Neko Case and Kelly Hogan and Cases band, Three Legs. The hometown crowd also got a cameo appearance at the end of the evening by Women + Country producer T Bone Burnett, who strapped on an electric guitar and spun out some of his inimitably tremulous lead lines.

The other musicians weren't so much Dylan's support staff as equal partners in a bold collaboration that has allowed the 40-year-old singer and songwriter to reach new musical vistas.

The challenge for any artist who creates as organically complete and artistically satisfying a work as Women + Country is how to present it live. Assuming he wasn't inclined to follow his contrarian dads lead and just ignore a new album entirely, the two choices were to deliver it in its entirety, as Peter Gabriel just did last week at the Hollywood Bowl with his Scratch My Back album, or serve it up in chunks interspersed with other material spanning a career.

Dylan the younger chose the latter path, with less consistently powerful results than Gabriel triumphantly delivered. What makes Women + Country a strong album-of-the-year contender is the lyrical and musical heft and emotional arc in the progression of its 11 songs.

Dylan wrestles with the open-ended promise that life represents in the albums opening track, “Nothing But the Whole Wide World," with which he also opened Thursdays show. From there, the album moves through the sadness that accompanies lost opportunity, empathy, bemused alienation, ennui and anger at humanity's squandering of its grander promise. Yet a ray of new hope emerges in “Holy Rollers for Love" and “They've Trapped Us Boys", the latter used by Dylan to conclude the show, a sparkling neo-bluegrass number amid the earthy country-rock-folk brew that characterizes most of the new songs.

But detouring as he did Thursday through his solo and Wallflowers material to pull in songs that could sonically blend with the newer stuff, Dylan siphoned off some of the force he potentially could have built in keeping the Women + Country material intact.