Bob Dylan Modern Times by: Justin Pearsall Mon:17-Sep-07 Label: Sony BMG Year: 2006 WB rating 79 out of 100

Wrongly regarded by some as the completion of a trilogy, Modern Times’ cyclical quality is predominately socially created. Yes, Time Out Of Mind, Love And Theft and Modern Times all represent a popular and critical renaissance for Dylan (an artist whose ‘80s work seemingly reinforced arguments that his best days were decades gone), and each does revolve around historical blues and folk tradition. However all are markedly different in the way they tackle these influences, lacking the revolving characters, consistent production style and similar packaging to suggest any continuation – the trilogy declarations yet another way in which the legend of Dylan instantly clouds and mythologises any new material.

But with the exaggerated trilogy misnomer comes a small yet important truth regarding the coherency and collectivist nature of Dylan’s more recent work, one recognised by the songwriter himself in his 2004 autobiographical writings, Chronicles: Volume One.

“Lonnie[Johnson, an American Blues singer/guitarist] took me aside one night and showed me a style of playing based on an odd instead of even-number system….It’s a highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord changes….And because this works on its own mathematical formula, it can’t miss….there are an infinite number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key.”

While the seeds of this mathematical approach were awoken on Time Out Of Mind with the slow burn 12-bar blues of ‘Til I Fell in Love With You’, Dylan, while speaking to Rolling Stone, stated that any idea of a trilogy must begin with Love And Theft, the album which first embraced the hypnotic, compulsive sound at the heart of this math blues.

The congruity between Dylan’s last two records is clear when juxtaposing the conga rhythm-and-response of ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’ with the rolling shuffle of ‘Thunder on the Mountain’, the respective opening tracks of Love And Theft and Modern Times. Both light on instrumentals and heavy on repetition, their magnetism is drawn from the break-neck way in which Dylan fires verse-after-verse at the listener, its insistent effect the musical equivalent to an outsider counting carriages on a passing freight train, the carriages eventually blurring together in spellbinding continuity.

But where approximately half of Love is Theft revolves around this “mathematical formula”, Modern Times is entirely housed within its structure. Pushing this pattern to breaking point verses extend into their 16th round, the songs averaging six minutes. Here Modern Times expressly rejects melodic, rhythmic and dynamic variation, usually the lynchpins of great albums, instead attempting to lock the listener in a transfixing groove, where metre usurps melody and emotion is found not in individual lines or phrases, but in slowly winding resolution.

The songwriting itself is only slightly more varied, consisting of roughly two faces; an up-tempo rhythmic shuffle (best exemplified in ‘Rollin’ and ‘Tumblin’ and ‘The Levee’s Gonna Break’) paired off against pre-War and classic sounding balladry. Such continual descriptions of repetition may seem to suggest that Dylan has fallen victim to not only his own legacy (the immortal Highway 61 Revisited being a more ingenuous and diverse example of lyrics and rhythm commanding melody) but also to the modern immunity towards the once shamanistic blues traditions. However, the opposite is true. Modern Times is not only made interesting via repetition, its ‘30s and ‘40s authenticity tears down the homogeneity associated with the more recent interpretations of blues (a sound popularised and eventually suffocated by the radio-length, hook-heavy form of the Stones). Forcing listeners through endless cycles to abandon structural prejudices, inviting them to slide, irresistibly, into the perpetual motion that once made ‘devil’s music’ both controversial and relevant.

Whilst the album’s innovative reappraisal of the blues invited and deserved a strong critical response, early glad-handlers suffered at the hands of the Dylan myth much like their trilogy counterparts, overstating the record’s lyrical merits with fancifully comparisons to the writings of Shakespeare, Yeats and Joyce. Dylan’s 32nd album is by no means perfect, nor is it his best. In fact the truest words written of Modern Times at its inception were from Guardian critic Alexis Petridis: “Modern Times is not one of those infrequent, unequivocally fantastic Dylan albums that allow a non-believer to grasp what the fuss is about.” But while Petridis’ point is true, his scorn of the critical creaming associated with Modern Times plays into the very myth he attacks others over, every paragraph containing at least a passing snide at the “middle-aged critics swooning in awe”. If it wasn’t for his four-star rating you’d be hard pressed to know that he even liked the album.

As Petridis proves, the way we view Dylan is as immortal as his reputation. Each album is intricately wrapped with legend, assured its place in history, for good or for bad. Such a legacy creates knee-jerk reactions on both sides, the over-enthusiastic only fuelling the cynical, and to be honest the ability of hindsight only does so much to remove this veil of myth. With Modern Times the listener, and indeed the critic, is best served by surrendering to the record’s rolling momentum, listlessly allowing the trilogy theorists, the middle-aged champions and the contradictions to sink, all lost to the enchanting inner rhythm that Dylan weaves. Regardless of the past and irrespective of the future, in modern times it is a valuable journey.