Given that every year we live is a slightly smaller fraction of our life than the previous one, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, ultimately, no music quite manages to mean as much to us as that of our early years. For Bob Dylan the elastic of memory must snap back that little bit stronger than most, to a time when popular culture could merely be enjoyed rather than manipulated. Listeners to his XM Satellite Radio show in the States won’t fail to have noticed that Dylan’s playlist — Hawkshaw Hawkins, Slim Gaillard, Robert Johnson — rarely includes anything recorded in the past few decades. In this week’s Rolling Stone, he claims not to “know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years”.

So whatever it is about Alicia Keys that has prompted Dylan to name-check her in the lyrics on his 44th album (“I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be”) we can safely assume that it’s not anything in Keys’ small canon. She was nonetheless “crazy excited” when told of her appearance on Thunder on the Mountain — six unexceptional R&B minutes of a vintage that attendees of his recent shows will recognise.

You don’t need to check the credits of Modern Times to clock that you’re listening to Dylan’s touring band — a well-drilled combo, adept at taking epoch-defining tunes and making them sound like a Tuesday night at the Ain’t Nothing But The Blues Bar.

But while only the most perverse Bobsessives will go out of their way to hear Like a Rolling Stone and Masters of War done in the style of ZZ Top on codeine, a brand new Dylan song makes more sense played that way. Someday Baby uses a blues riff that had already served John Lee Hooker well by the time Otis Spann (another favourite on Dylan’s radio show) made it the basis of his own Someday Soon Baby. In all but name, Beyond the Horizon is Red Sails in the Sunset. Having made it cool for boomer icons to address the onset of mortality, these songs show Dylan cheering up in his dotage.

Pending death, it’s a matter of logical certainty that there’s life in the old dog yet. Two cases in point are When the Deal Goes Down and Spirit on the Water, the kind of soppy old-timey love songs that could have appeared on almost any Van Morrison album since 1990. “You think I’m over the hill,” its creator intones on the latter. “I’m past my prime/Let’s see what you’ve got/We can have a whomping good time.”

Anyone searching for something that draws deeper than mere pastiche will inevitably hold up two songs as evidence of Dylan’s continuing ability to steer a rhapsody through the most improbable route. Working Man’s Blues #2 and Ain’t Talking elliptically salute human goodness in an increasingly impersonal world. On the latter, he’s carrying a dead man’s shield and walking with a toothache in his heel.

Dylanologists will duly decode it all, while the rest will hear a man less resentful and more reconciled to the passing of what he called his “expeditionary” years. If there really hasn’t been a decent record made in the past two decades, Modern Times is hardly an end to the drought. It’s triumph of modest objectives: no more, no less.

Columbia

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