Bob Dylan Modern Times CD

Bob Dylan's first new album in five years! His 44th album features 10 new songs and is the third release in an outstanding trilogy along with Time Out Of Mind and Love And Theft. This special edition includes a DVD featuring 4 additional songs and an expanded booklet.

Personnel: Bob Dylan (vocals, guitar, harmonica, piano); Denny Freeman, Stuart Kimball (guitar); Donnie Herron (steel guitar, mandolin, violin, viola); Tony Garnier (cello, acoustic bass); George G. Receli (drums, percussion).
It's arguable that at no point since his 1960s heyday has Bob Dylan been as celebrated as in the decade following his critically acclaimed 1997 album TIME OUT OF MIND. Numerous films, books, and albums--mostly Columbia's impressive archive series of reissues--have been part of a universal canonization of the singer and met with considerable enthusiasm by fans and critics alike. 2006's MODERN TIMES, the third album to have been released in nearly 10 years and part of a trilogy that also includes 2001's brilliant and upbeat LOVE AND THEFT, is easily deserving of such enthusiasm and is further reason for the formal veneration.
Musically, the album finds Dylan once again mining the stately traditionalist sound first heard on LOVE AND THEFT. Lazy blues numbers, piano-based songbook pop, and jumpin' country swing provide the backdrop for Dylan's continuing study of the vicissitudes of life, love, and death. Although he is certainly world-weary, a lot of life is lived in the verses of these songs and there is a dogged spirituality that provides, if not hope (a rather prosaic notion for Dylan by this point, to be sure), at least a means to finding contentment. Finally, a word about Dylan's voice here: while his singing has always been unconventional and never pretty in any traditional sense, in its raspy magnificence it is simply perfect for this timeless music.
When Bob Dylan dropped Time Out of Mind in 1997, it was a rollicking rockabilly and blues record, full of sad songs about mortality, disappointment, and dissolution. 2001 brought Love and Theft, which was also steeped in stomping blues and other folk forms. It was funny, celebratory in places and biting in others. Dylan has been busy since then: he did a Victoria's Secret commercial, toured almost nonstop, was in a couple films -- Larry Charles' Masked and Anonymous and Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home -- and published the first of a purported three volumes of his cagey, rambling autobiography, Chronicles. Lately, he's been 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 like 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 orphanages/ 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; it feels live, immediate, and in places even shambolic. Rhythms slip, time stretches and turns back on itself, and lyrics are rushed to fit into verses that just won't stop coRolling Stone (pp.99-100) - 5 stars out of 5 -- "The mood is America on the brink -- of mechanization, of war, of domestic tranquility, of fulfilling its promise and of selling its dreams one by one for cash on the barrelhead....It is music of accumulated knowledge..."
Rolling Stone (p.102) - Ranked #1 in Rolling Stone's "The Top 50 Albums Of 2006" -- "MODERN TIMES is a groove album disguised as a poetry album..."
Entertainment Weekly (p.75) - "Intriguing, immediate, and quietly epic, MODERN TIMES must rank among Dylan's finest albums."
Entertainment Weekly (p.130) - Ranked #7 in Entertainment Weekly's "Top 10 Records Of 2006" -- "MODERN TIMES adds another glorious chapter to Dylan's late-career renaissance..."
Q (p.126) - Ranked #7 in Q Magazine's "100 Greatest Albums of 2006" -- "[I]t offered strident blues, wistful ragtime and shimmering ballads."
Uncut (p.72) - 5 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he emotional breadth is helped by one of Dylan's strongest singing performances....A Dylan who finally seems comfortable, and is ready to take things as far as it'll go."
No Depression (pp.97-98) - "[T]he album is both the most playfully sexual and profoundly spiritual from Dylan in decades."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.94) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[A] great deal of it is split between 12-bar treatises about love and lust and croonsome ballads about much the same themes, and one regularly gets the sense that its author might just be having a whale of a time."