Infidels was the first secular record
Bob Dylan recorded since
Street Legal, and it's far more like a classicist
Dylan album than that one, filled with songs that are evocative in their imagery and direct in their approach. This is lean, much like
Slow Train Coming, but its writing is closer to
Dylan's peak of the mid-'70s, and some of the songs here -- particularly on the first side -- are minor classics, capturing him reviving his sense of social consciousness and his gift for poetic, elegant love songs. For a while,
Infidels seems like a latter-day masterpiece, but toward the end of the record it runs out of steam, preventing itself from being a triumph. Still, in comparison to everything that arrived in the near-decade before it,
Infidels is a triumph, finding
Dylan coming tantalizingly close to regaining all his powers. [In 2003, Columbia/Legacy reissued 15 selected titles from
Dylan's catalog as hybrid SACDs, playable in both regular CD players and Super Audio CD players. Each title is packaged as a digipak, containing the full original artwork. On each of the titles, and on each of the layers, the remastered sound is spectacular, a considerable upgrade from the initial CD pressings.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide