Forty-four albums into a sixty-five year old life and Dylan records still come complete with curious reverence and a sense of occasion. After the wretched fallowness of his ’80s output, it’s nice to have a Bob worth quizzing and buzzing about again—witness the decade-long creative mean streak of Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, his Never Ending Tour, his XM Satellite Theme Time Radio show, his Chronicles auto-biography and Scorsese’s masterful No Direction Home. (For the record, Masked and Anonymous really doesn’t count). So—what’s Dylan on about with that speeding car cover image and Chaplin-esque album title? What’s so damned modern Bob?

Like Love and Theft—sometimes too much so—Dylan’s Modern Times is a chilled-out empire burlesque. Mangy self-produced blues such as the wiry “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” are brusque and clean, tingling and throbbing. This allows airy tremblers like “Thunder on the Mountain”—with its strident piano runs and clucking guitars—room for Dylan’s pinched growl to jump at the end of each line; phrases about pork chops, pies and the unlikeliest of obsessions are stuck amidst north blown winds and popped pistols. “Wonder where in the world/Alicia Keys could be,” he wheedles nasally. “I’m the oldest son of a crazy man/I’m in a cowboy band” yowls Dylan through a slow plucked thumper like “Nettie Moore”—a rattled violin-filled hollow where Bible scriptures and bad luck women intersect. Lots of bad luck women.

Then there’s Times’ haughtiest Tin Pan Alley cats and country swingers, songs that blow cool and easy and blissfully in opposition to the ire of his words. And they’re adorable. To a point.

Where Theft’s sweet vaudeville and country numbers seemed a breath of fresh air, on Modern Times they let Dylan down. The political ardor of “Workingman’s Blues,” the wounds of “Beyond the Horizon” are undermined by melodies, which are, quite frankly, piffle. They’re too pretty. Too ripe with cozy chord changes and plump arrangements. But these are but a momentary bump on the rocky road to Times’ stoic, bone chilling closer, “Ain’t Talkin.” Elegiac and unsettled, filled with the sort of gypsy violin wail that made Desire so broken, “Talkin” allows its wounded flowers to dangle while dreaming of a love that should’ve been. With a burnished howl that softy hushes into each descending chord, chorus and repetitive stanza, Dylan marches into the sunset, eating “hog eyed grease in a hog eyed town” at the world’s end. And this is when you realize that, like Deadwood’s foul stench and moral decrepitude, the love of Dylan’s Modern Times is a thing of his past, his dreamy Nashville Skylines turned black and red.

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