Bob Dylan
Modern Times
on Columbia RecordsA

Five years after the critical smash Love and Theft, little has changed for Bob Dylan. On Modern Times, the legendary songwriter's 32nd studio album, his music still breathes like a sawmill, all gruff and gritty and giddy. Precision takes a backseat to songcraft; often, Modern Times' band of players sound as unrehearsed and shambolic--not to mention as buoyant--as Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue band, who barely rehearsed for two days before setting out on a Fall 1975 tour.

The result is a classic Dylan album, both as we've never heard him before and as familiar as ever. Less traipsing and fatalistic than the 1997 comeback album Time Out of Mind, and even easier and more laid-back than Love and Theft, Modern Times plays like the antithesis of its title--a 10-song shuffle through blues-rock antiquity, free-wheeling, joyous and erudite. A carefreeness is Dylan's confidence here, as on his 1969 country-rock crooner Nashville Skyline. He's content, for the most part, with sheer pleasantry; even Modern Times' rockers are wry and bubbly.

The album opener "Thunder on the Mountain" is Modern Times' mission statement, a shuffling rockabilly anthem in which an animated grand piano weaves around jazzy guitar licks and muted drum meditations (Dylan, producing here as "Jack Frost," wisely had percussionist George Receli play with brushes). "Thunder" plays like a troubadour's raison d'atre: "You brought me here, now you're trying to run me away," he sings. "The rattle on the wall, come read it, come see what it says."

While the album's arrangements are breezy, the lyrics aren't always. "Workingman's Blues #2" offers the type of worldly reflections Dylan's avoided for years ("The buying power of the proletariat's gone down/money's getting shallow and weak.") In "Nettie Moore," he laments, "The world has gone black before my eyes," longing not for love unrequited, but for a deeper companionship lost. The track shares its title with a mid-19th century song bemoaning the loss of a lover--a fellow slave, sold to a new master.

It's moments like "Nettie Moore"--not to mention nods to Muddy Waters and other blues masters--that indicate Dylan is far more interested in bygone eras than the ones he defined. Where Love and Theft seemed to blend many of the best moments of Dylan's career, Modern Times crystallizes a boon at the center of all great rock 'n' roll: Popular music is a narrative, and here, Dylan continues to weave it with eyes in both directions.

-Jonathan Fischer