When Bob Dylan dropped the deeply moving yet mournful and brooding Time Out of Mind in 1997, it was a rollicking rockabilly and blues record full of songs about mortality, disappointment, and dissolution. 2001 brought Love and Theft, an album steeped in blues and other folk forms that was funny, celebratory, biting, and stomping. In the five years since that set, Dylan was busy: he did everything from a Victoria's Secret commercial, to endlessly touring, to being in a couple of films -- Larry Charles' Masked and Anonymous and as the subject of the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home -- to publishing the first of the purported three volumes of his cagey and rambling autobiography Chronicles, to thinking about Alicia Keys. This last comment comes from the man himself in "Thunder on the Mountain," the opening track on Modern Times, a barn-burning, raucous, and unruly blues tune that finds the old man sounding mighty feisty and gleefully agitated: "I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys/Couldn't keep from cryin'/She was born in Hell's Kitchen and I was livin' down the line/I've been lookin' for her even clear through Tennessee." The drums shuffle with brushes, the piano is pumping à la Jerry Lee Lewis, the bass is popping, and a slide guitar that feels like it's calling the late Michael Bloomfield back from 1966 -- à la Highway 61 Revisited -- slips in and out of the ether like a ghost wanting to emerge in the flesh. Dylan's own choppy leads snarl in the break and he's letting his blues fall down like rain: "Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches/I'll recruit my army from the oldest villages/I've been to St. Herman's church and said my religious vows/I sucked the milk out of a thousand cows/I got the pork chop, she got the pie/She ain't no angel and neither am I...I did all I could/I did it right there and then/I've already confessed I don't need to confess again."

Thus begins the third part of Dylan's renaissance trilogy (thus far, y'all). Modern Times is raw, shambolic in places. Rhythms slip, time stretches and turns back on itself, and lyrics are rushed to fit into verses that won't stop coming. Dylan produced the set himself under his Jack Frost moniker, and it feels live, immediate. Its songs are humorous and cryptic, tender and snarling. What's he saying? We don't need to concern ourselves with that any more than we had to Willie Dixon talking about backdoor men or his metaphors for love and trouble, or Elmore James dusting his broom. Dylan's blues are primitive and impure. Though played by a crackerjack band, they're played with a fury as the singer wrestles down musical history and tradition as he spits in the eye of the modern world. But blues isn't the only music here. There are parlor songs such as "Spirit on the Water," where love is as heavenly and earthly a thing as exists in this life. The band swings gently and carefree, with Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball playing slippery -- and sometimes sloppy -- jazz chords as Tony Garnier's bass and George Receli's sputtering snare walk the beat. Another, "When the Deal Goes Down," makes it tempting to think of Dylan aping Bing Crosby in his gravelly snake rattle of a voice (but find someone who can phrase better). He's an unabashed fan of the old arch meanie crooner. But it just ain't Bing, because it's got that swing.

Dylan comes from the great blues and jazzman Lonnie Johnson (whose version of the Grosz and Coslow standard "Tomorrow Night" he's been playing for years in his live set). If you need further proof, look to Johnson's last recordings done in the late '50s and early '60s ("I Found a Dream" and "I'll Get Along Somehow"), or go all the way back to the early years for "Secret Emotions," and "In Love Again," cut in 1940. It is in these songs where you will find the heart of Dylan's sweet song ambition. Dylan evokes Muddy Waters in "Rollin' and Tumblin." He swipes the riff, the tune itself, and uses some of the words and adds a whole bunch of his own. Same with his use of Slim Harpo in "Someday Baby" -- who may have copped his riff from Muddy anyway. Those who think Dylan merely plagiarizes miss the point. Dylan is a folk musician; he uses folk forms such as blues, rock, gospel, and R&B as well as lyrics and licks and/or whatever else he can to get a song across. This tradition of borrowing and retelling goes back to the beginning of song and story. Even the title of Modern Times is a wink-eye reference to a film by Charlie Chaplin. It doesn't make him less; it makes him more because he contains all of these songs, their secret histories, and subtle nuances and labyrinthine legends; and besides, he's been around long enough to do anything he damn well pleases.

Modern Times expresses emotions and comments upon everything from love ("When the Deal Goers Down," "Beyond the Horizon") to mortality ("The Levee's Gonna Break," "Ain't Talkin") to the state of the union and world -- check "Workingman's Blues #2," where Dylan sings gently about the "buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down/Money's getting shallow and weak...they say low wages are reality if we want to compete at all." But in the next breath he's put his "cruel weapons on the shelf" and invites his beloved to sit on his knee, telling her she means more to him than himself. It's a poignant midtempo ballad that walks the line between the political stories of Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie to the love songs of Stephen Foster and Leadbelly and early doo wop records. One can feel both darkness and light struggling inside the singer for dominance. But in his carnal and spiritual imagery and rakish honesty, he's not giving in to either side. This is a storyteller, a pilgrim, who's seen it all, has lived it all, and found it all wanting; he's found some infinitesimal take on the truth that he's holding on to with a vengeance. In the midst of changes that are foreboding, Modern Times is the sound of an ambivalent Psalter coming in from the storm, dirty, bloodied, but laughing at himself -- because he knows nobody will believe him anyway.

Dylan digs deep into the pocket of American song past in "Nettie Moore," a 19th century tune from which he borrowed the title and first line of its chorus. He also uses words by W.C. Handy and Robert Johnson as he extends the meaning of the tome by adding his own metaphorical images and wry observations. However, even as the song is from antiquity; it's full of the rest of Modern Times bemusement. "The Levee's Gonna Break" shakes and shimmies as it warns about the coming catastrophe. Coming as it does on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it's a particularly poignant number that reveals apocalypse and redemption and rails on the greedy and powerful as it parties in the gutter. There are no sacred cows -- when Dylan evokes Carl Perkins' exhortation to put "your cat clothes on," it's hard not to stomp around maniacally even as you feel his righteousness come through. The great irony is in the final track, "I Ain't Talkin'," where a lonesome fiddle, piano, and hand percussion spill out a gypsy ballad that states a yearning, an unsatisfied spiritual hunger. The pilgrim wanders, walks, and aspires to do good unto others, though he falters often -- he sometimes wants to commit homicide. It's all part of the stroll. The guitar interplay with the fiddle (a second gypsy melody as one of gypsy swing comes through loud and clear and sweet in "Beyond the Horizon") and the one-note bassline are hypnotic. Dylan's simmering growl adds a sense of apprehension, of whistling through the graveyard, of determination to get to he knows not where, but supposedly it's the other side of the world. It sends the album off with a wry sense of foreboding. This pilgrim is sticking to what he knows is solid -- the motion of his feet.

Modern Times offers a new weird America, one stranger than any that's come before, because it's merely part of a new weird world. In these ten songs, bawdy joy, restless heartache, comical scenes, and bottomless sadness all coexist and inform one another as a warning and celebration of this precious human life and wondering about whatever comes after. This world view is expressed through forms threatened with extinction: old rackety blues that pack an electrically charged wallop, parlor tunes and crooned pop-style ballads that could have come from the 1930s or even the 1890s. Modern Times is the work of a professional mythmaker, a back-alley magician and prophetic creator of mischief. It offers a view of the pilgrim as pickpocket, the thief as holy man, the lover as the fighter. And all bets are on to see who finishes dead last. What could be more confusing or so ultimately timeless as contradiction as entertainment, provided with a knowing, barely detectable grin.

(All Music Guide)