Critical reception
Oliver Trager describes "Cold Irons Bound" as "biting" with "ricocheting guitar licks, rockabilly drums, distorted organ, and [a] voice floating in a blimp of its own echo", in which "one can still hear, to paraphrase "Visions of Johanna", the ghost of electricity howling from the bones of Dylan's face..." [3] Greil Marcus of The San Francisco Examiner made note of the song's "whiplashed rhythm", [4] while Mick Gold, in a retrospective piece for Rock's Backpages, highlighted the memorability of the track's " musique concrete bluesy clutter", saying "the musical noise is more memorable than the lyrics." [5] AllMusic's Jim Esch said: "Thanks to Daniel Lanois's muddy, echo drenched production, 'Cold Irons Bound' sounds like it was mailed in from another time, decades ago from the midnight blue ether. Dylan's voice is at times overmatched by the thick sonic soup, but all the same, the feel is there, and the feel is gnarly, bluesy. Nasty guitars and drums clatter and shuffle overtop a bass riff while Dylan whips off acerbic couplets". [6] Michael Gray also describes this song in detail:
"There's an interesting tension, too, in "Cold Irons Bound," perhaps more accurately an interesting inappropriateness between, on one side, the grinding electronic blizzard of the music and the cold, aircraft-hangar echo of the voice lamenting its sojourn across a lethal planet - fields turned brown, sky lowering with clouds of blood, winds that can tear you to shreds, mists like quicksand - and on the other side the recurrently stated pursuit of tenderness, in phrases that seem imported from another consciousness...It's decidedly odd to hear, pitched against the scraping Lanois winds half tearing us to shreds, sentiments as obdurately "romantic" as
- I found my world, found my world in you
- or
- Lookin' at you and I'm on my bended knee
- or
- I tried to love and protect you
- and to hear such a defensively bleak, exhausted old voice articulate the thought that
- I'm gonna remember forever the joy we've shared. [7] "
Spectrum Culture included the song on a list of "Bob Dylan's 20 Best Songs of the '90s". In an article accompanying the list, critic Kevin Korber argued that the song is more interesting for the music, and Lanois' atmospheric production, than for Dylan's lyrics: "'Cold Irons Bound' is the ur-example of what Daniel Lanois could do with Dylan, a collaboration that started back with Oh Mercy but arrived in full form on Time Out of Mind. In contrast to the clear, compressed sounds that Dylan began the decade with, 'Irons' is incredibly murky, an echo-laden blues jam that sounds completely disassociated from this plane of existence. Dylan’s voice, by this point weaker and thornier than it had been at his peak, could have been lost in the studio ether, but it instead sounds haunted, a spectral song from a realm beyond ours". [8]
A 2021 Consequence article ranking Dylan's top 15 albums placed Time Out of Mind seventh and cited "Cold Irons Bound" as the highlight. Critic Matt Melis wrote that it was "an agitated, pining, and paranoid album, and nowhere do those emotions register more tangible than on 'Cold Irons Bound'. Amid driving percussion and echoing dirt-road blues, Dylan fails to square a love and obsession that just can’t be reasoned with. This isn’t a tearful goodbye and gallop off into the sunset; this is a collision course that a desperate and broken man seems powerless to avoid. Like so much of Dylan’s turn-of-the-century work, there’s zero compromise to be found here. The wounds are deep, the pain is unbearable, and any possible consolation is blowin’ in the wind". [9]
The Big Issue placed the Masked and Anonymous version at #46 on a 2021 list of the "80 best Bob Dylan songs - that aren't the greatest hits". An article accompanying the list noted that the "bemusing film Dylan wrote and starred in...delivered some storming live performances, including this version of the Time Out of Mind track". [10]
