BOB DYLAN

Modern Times

2006-09-04

Dylan’s previous album, Love And Theft was released on 9/11/01, an ominous date for a record that featured playful and tongue-in-cheek lyrics recalling the legendary artist’s classic recordings of the mid-sixties. In the five years since, Dylan has been busy, bucking his reclusive reputation by appearing in films and authoring a memoir. He has also been writing typically wonderful songs. The new release Modern Times is a collection of dirty blues, rags, and hollers, with lyrics that reference everything from Hurricane Katrina to Alicia Keys! The style is quintessentially Dylan enough to please hardcore fans and perhaps even draw a few who have found him previously inaccessible. In the tradition of the great folk music which made him famous, he borrows melodies, hooks and even a few lyrics from the likes of Robert Johnson, W.C. Handy, and Muddy Waters, taking old standards and re-inventing them the way only he can. With a tight and swinging swamp blues band backing him, and using his ruined voice to it’s full emotional effect, Dylan has created an album that fits in and adds perfectly to his recent renaissance which began in 1997 with his Grammy winning Time Out Of Mind, and one that can hold up as a nostalgic compliment to masterpieces Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. So listen and enjoy, as the most prolific, prophetic, combative, frustrating, self-denying voice-of-a-generation artists continues to do his thing like nobody else! - Calin

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