But what initially comes across as an unusually easygoing and simple Bob Dylan record -- and Dylan records don't get more immediately accessible than this -- in fact turns out to be no such thing. It may sound warmly nostalgic on the surface, but hidden in its grooves are some pretty complex, vitriolic, and vengeful feelings.

Modern Times is being promoted as the final installment in a trilogy that's so far included 1997's Time Out of Mind and 2001's Love and Theft. After a patchy early '90s, these two superlative records reignited Dylan's artistic and commercial flame, while also cementing a new image as a craggy, husky-voiced old cowpoke, who in his salad days had apparently started a revolution or two. But, while sharing their down-home charms, Modern Times is even more enchantingly mysterious and whimsical than its predecessors.

''Workingman's Blues #2,'' meanwhile, critiques the U.S. economy and, apart from its unusual tenderness and canny rhyming of ''new path that we trod'' and ''compete abroad,'' might have come from the pen of Bruce Springsteen. It's as beautiful and stirring a song as Dylan's ever written.

If Modern Times halted at track 9, the rockin' ''The Levee's Gonna Break,'' it would have a rounded, redemptive feel -- but it doesn't. Final song ''Ain't Talkin','' an almost nine-minute semi-spoken blues, shows that Bob's still capable of dark epiphanies.

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