Bob Dylan - Modern Times

It's a good time to be a fan of Dylan. His last three records now--Time Out of Mind, Love & Theft, and now Modern Times--have all been jaw-droppingly fantastic. A man in his early 60s shouldn't be able to make music that is vital and immediate, your brain tells you.

Don't listen to your brain. It is lying to you, as it does with so many things.

Trust rather your ears, which will hear some of the best damn music out there on Modern Times. Falling somewhere in style and tone between Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft, Modern Times seems actually anything but. Dylan uses genres and song forms that were popular sixty, even seventy years ago, bouncing between traditional pop, jump blues, ballads, and apocalpytic ruminations about women, the world, and what went wrong with both of them. Lyrically, this album is at least as strong as Time Out of Mind or Love & Theft, leaning more towards the end-of-the-world wearniess of the former than the sentimentality of the latter (though he manages to mix the two quite well on a few songs, especially "Ain't Talkin'." I don't know how he does it, either).

These songs feel immediate and crafted, the work of a man who's been making music for well over 40 years now. There's an effortless competency to these songs, a sense that Dylan could crank out potential classic after potential classic in this way until the day he died (oh please let this be the case, ohpleaseohpleaseohplease).

This isn't to say the record is perfect. The major flaw is one Dylan's suffered from for decades: knowing when to stop. Some of the songs run on a bit too long and could have benefited from some judicious editing (the beautiful "Spirit on the Water," for instance, is a fantastic song with some great lyrics, but it just keeps going. Nearly eight minutes is just too much, given how little variation there is in the instrumentation in the song, and the circular guitar riff is nice but gets old after about five minutes). Dylan's always had a tendency to let songs go on longer than they should ("Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" jumps readily to mind), but it's a weakness that a good majority of these songs suffer from. For an album that only runs 10 songs, it lasts for an hour. But at its best moments, you don't notice this. The songs generally flow pretty well, and Dylan's backing band is supple and muscular like an Olympic runner (but not one of those Olympians on steroids. No, this is one of those lean, wiry runners who can leg it down the track really damn fast, but usually prefers the long-distance events where they can pace themselves, run forever, and still have a burst of unexpected energy in the last 100 yards).

Despite that tortured metaphor, Dylan's backing band--his touring band for the past several years, though sadly now minus Charlie Sexton (damn you for pursuing solo interests, Charlie Sexton! Even if your solo work is so damn good)--is the perfect complement to Dylan's songs and his voice (no mean feat, lemme tell ya. His voice just gets more worn-out each time).

Overall, this is just another great album from a man who has clearly reached a late-career peak. While it probably won't win him any new converts to the fold, he's not really making music to win new listeners. He's just making the music he'd want to listen to, and the rest of us just get the benefit of that fact.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Bob Dylan, "Ain't Talkin'"