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. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine