Even though it is still sinking in, there seems no doubt after early listens that Bob Dylan's Modern Times continues the remarkable renaissance which began with 1997's Time Out of Mind. As John Lennon once said, what Dylan says matters less than how he says it, and his voice, which deserted him for so long, remains epochal on this recording; the music remains as vital as it was 40 years ago (!), when Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde set new standards for what could be accomplished in rock music.
Dylan is now heading into uncharted territory. For nearly twenty years, following Blood on the Tracks, his inspiration seemed sporadic; his voice seemed shot. That is not to say that he didn't make good music during this period; he did - cuts like "Every Grain of Sand," "Blind Willie McTell," and "Most of the Time" stand alongside his classics without shame - but rather, that he was either unable or unwilling to sustain such excellence across a single album recording. What is left today are a lot of albums that may be good by most standards, but can only be considered mediocre (or worse) when compared to what came before it in the Dylan pantheon.
Things began to change when Dylan truly went back to his roots in the early 1990s with two acoustic albums that were comprised entirely of folk songs that he just as easily could have recorded 30 years before. Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong were great albums, but the question remained whether Dylan had it in himself to write songs that could stand against the tracks on his mid-1960s masterworks. He proved that he could, and now he has done it for three consecutive albums. It's a bit scary, if not awe-inspiring.
More to come...
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