Just before the flood....

Neil Young once said about his catalogue: "It's all the same song." Surely this more accurately describes Bob Dylan's. I haven't yet formed a conclusive opinion about Modern Times, but the brazenness with which he quotes if not steals Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters, melodies and chord changes from his own "Love & Theft" radiates its own kind of benighted sincerity. My expectations -- conditioned by years of buying this old coot's drivel after impressive hot streaks -- are so low that all I can be grateful for are good Dylan songs, and every one of these (with the exception of "Someday Baby") is a Good Dylan Song. And this certainly can't be said for the majority of the dull dull dull Time Out of Mind. The album's expediency is itself beguiling. You can listen to "Workingman Blues #2" and "Beyond the Horizon," or not; you can play the album at the end or the middle or the beginning; it makes no difference. Modern Times doubles on itself, comments on itself, a pristine example of post-modernism, with a band schooled enough in blues verities to avoid the hotshot moments that Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell's guitars indulged in on the superior "Love & Theft". Whether stopping to lament that "the buying power of the proletariat" has deteriorated, admitting nary a word of remorse for wanting to kill a man in the closer "Ain't Talkin'" (it's as heartstopping as Mountain Goat John Darnielle's anomic 2004 murder reverie "Against Pollution"), Dylan can't hide his glee in running through the repertoire of blues tropes; he sheds his humanity for the comfort of the tower of song. Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Elrewine is correct: "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."

Modern Times confirms what Time Out of Mind augured and "Love & Theft" refined: Dylan was never human, not really, not in the sense that you and I are (he makes David Bowie look like Ray Charles). He's gone so far into his music that when it's time for him to gaze at the world it's refracted through the cracked looking-glass of an imagination wholly contingent upon its source material. When a real-life referent appears (the oft-cited Alica Keys line in "Thunder on the Mountain") it feels at first like a sop: ok, the buzzard still glances at Billboard now and then. But it has the perverse effect of exacerbating Dylan's formidable distance from love and pain; this isn't Method acting, it's closer to the English way of creating a character out of peripherals in the hope that the surface will suggest the tumult within. This is really awesome, as far as it goes, and Dylan's grasp of the material means we're less likely to get a Knocked Out Loaded anytime soon; yet, hmmm...maybe he should. At least Knocked Out Loaded intimated that he left his tour bus on occasion.

(Tropical Storm Ernesto, scraping the mountains of Cuba, is less than 12 hours from a South Florida landfall. I'll see you on the other side.)