When Bob Dylan dropped the deeply moving yet mournful and brooding Time Out of Mind in 1997, it was a rollicking rockabilly and blues record full of songs about mortality, disappointment, and dissolution. 2001 brought Love and Theft, an album steeped in blues and other folk forms that was funny, celebratory, biting, and stomping. In the five years since that set, Dylan was busy: he did everything from a Victoria's Secret commercial, to endlessly touring, to being in a couple of films -- Larry Charles' Masked and Anonymous and as the subject of the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home -- to publishing the first of the purported three volumes of his cagey and rambling autobiography Chronicles. ...

Modern Times offers a new weird America, one stranger than any that's come before, because it's merely part of a new weird world. In these ten songs, bawdy joy, restless heartache, comical scenes, and bottomless sadness all coexist and inform one another as a warning and celebration of this precious human life and wondering about whatever comes after. This world view is expressed through forms threatened with extinction: old rackety blues that pack an electrically charged wallop, parlor tunes and crooned pop-style ballads that could have come from the 1930s or even the 1890s. Modern Times is the work of a professional mythmaker, a back-alley magician and prophetic creator of mischief. It offers a view of the pilgrim as pickpocket, the thief as holy man, the lover as the fighter. And all bets are on to see who finishes dead last. What could be more confusing or so ultimately timeless as contradiction as entertainment, provided with a knowing, barely detectable grin. - All Music Guide