Arriving in the afterglow of Martin Scorsese’s laudatory No Direction Home, Dylan’s first album in five years carries the burden of great expectations. But behind the obligatory return-to-form hyperbole, Modern Times is no masterpiece. Recorded with the 65-year-old icon’s current touring band and produced by “Jack Frost”, aka Dylan himself, it draws from the same reservoir of vintage Americana as his fair-to-middling 2001 Grammy winner, Love and Theft.

A rambling river of blues, country, gospel and folk, much of it invokes a sepia-tinted heartland idyll that predates rock’n’roll.

The standout tracks are mostly ballads, perhaps because Dylan’s parched husk of a voice is far better suited nowadays to wistful regret than surly spite or lusty jubilation. Graceful understatement fuels gently troubled romantic reveries such as Spirit on the Water and the sublime, melancholy waltz When the Deal Goes Down, which flirts with gospel in its devotional tone and quasi-biblical imagery.

Better still is the blue-collar hymn Workingman’s Blues #2. Dylan’s sardonic musings on low wages, globalisation and “the buying power of the proletariat” will excite those idealists who still consider him a political protest singer. But the lyric soon slips into more cryptic, opaquely personal terrain. The great dissembler strikes again, although the tune still packs a satisfying emotional punch.

So far, so promising. Sadly, Modern Times is also knee-deep in those thigh- slapping, foot-tapping, relentlessly average 12-bar blues-rockers that have become Dylan’s default setting in recent years. Despite a baffling namecheck for Alicia Keys, Thunder on the Mountain sounds like Status Quo on an off night. Dylan has always followed a wayward muse, but to end up sounding like a Dire Straits covers band is a bitter irony too far.

Too much of Modern Times is lazy and unfocused, but it imparts just enough autumnal grandeur and poetic wisdom to keep the Dylan myth-making machine ticking over. And maybe, after half a century in music, that is all we can reasonably expect from him.

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