Send "Neil Diamond " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Guardian |
 Johnny Cash's Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings series of bleak covers has provided many a mature performer with a blueprint for career rebirth. However, after previously working with Rubin on mostly original material (including 2008's Home Before Dark, Diamond's first ever US/UK No 1), Dreams works better than most. The 69-year-old singer – who has confessed in interviews to having virtually no real friends – has unearthed the lonely, desolate heart of songs as diverse as Bill Withers's Ain't No Sunshine and Gilbert O'Sullivan's once-jaunty Alone Again (Naturally). The minimal recordings (often just voice, guitar and piano) give proceedings an eerie feel, and Diamond's hurting vocals must be among the most emotional he has ever delivered. Even songs dulled by ubiquity – Hallelujah and Yesterday – are presented in new light. His own I'm a Believer, made famous by the Monkees, is exquisitely chilling as Diamond explores the suspicion and paranoia behind lines such as, "I thought love was only true in fairytales....full text |
| Nowtoronto |
| After years of getting the Rick Rubin career reboot treatment, which proved enormously effective on 2008’s surprise smash Home Before Dark, the golden-voiced American singer takes it easy on himself on Dreams, a stripped-down covers record, the one exception being I’m A Believer (though most assume it’s a Monkees song anyway). Diamond’s song selection will hardly shake anyone’s world – two each by the Beatles and Randy Newman – but he has the vocal power to make many cuts his own. Jim Weatherly’s Midnight Train To Georgia and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah are standouts, while Diamond found a way to further mellow out the Eagles’ Desperado. Enjoyable but not essential....full text |
| Bbc |
| Neil Diamond, 70 this coming January, rebooted his cred over the 00s with two pomp-free, Rick Rubin-produced albums. The second, Home Before Dark, gave him his first ever US/UK number one. So he may feel he’s earned the right to indulge in a cosy, Strictly Results Show-friendly covers record. Dreams is again stripped-down – most tracks feature just his grizzled voice and a guitar or piano – but there’s no artistic risk in crooning Ain’t No Sunshine and Yesterday. Yet that indefinable something that makes the greats great means there is a world of difference between Diamond singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and an X Factor contestant wobbling their scales. Neil sounds like he means it. There are cracks and tears in his vocal readings here, but they give it soul. Whether he’s truly in the zone or just employing a lifetime’s technique, Dreams, which on paper might sound twee, is really rather moving. Not least when he offers a re-interpretation of I’m a Believer, the hit The Monkees borrowed to make their name and his. He slows it down, annexes a hint of the arrangement of I Am… I Said, and draws out its innate qualities as a modern hymn to romance. He tackles songs he loved when growing up (The Everly Brothers’ Let It Be Me) and numbers by contemporaries (The Beatles’ Blackbird, Leon Russell’s/The Carpenters’ A Song For You). There are charming curveballs – on Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again (Naturally) he presses home the pathos of the words, and on Midnight Train to Georgia he successfully switches the subject’s gender (not as easy as he makes it sound). He parches the Eagles’ Desperado ‘til it’s dry as a bone, and finds the core of nuggets by Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman....full text |
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