Slate’s Jody Rosen gives Modern Times a very positive review (Bob Dylan’s spectacular new album, Modern Times.), and also calls it “Dylan’s finest since Blood On The Tracks.” I swear that someone in the media has said that regarding every album he’s released since Blood On The Tracks (except for Saved).

Misogyny also makes an appearance:

“In “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” he barks, “Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains,” a doozy of a misogynistic dis, even by Snoop Dogg standards.”

The Newark Star Ledger says that “expectations are higher for his 44th album than for probably any since 1975’s ‘Blood on the Tracks.’” I don’t know how you arrive at such an estimate, but — who knows — it could be true.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says:

“Modern Times” doesn’t have the core of truly great songs or the creative ambition that elevated discs like “Blood on the Tracks” or “Blonde on Blonde,” but it also has few true soft spots. It merits an honorable place in the second tier of Dylan’s resumé.

Hmm. You can see why Dylan, as he says in his latest Rolling Stone interview ( as well as the previous RS interview), doesn’t like to see his new albums compared to his old albums. He would prefer them to be compared instead to what else is out there in the marketplace.

Reed Watson in The Crimson White Online, on the other hand, finds the comparison favorable:

“Modern Times” is the story of a world where the preacher makes a profit and the homeless man retreats to his mansion in the hills. It’s contradiction, dripping with irony and meddling in serious consequences for whomever stands in its way. And the greatest songwriter who has ever lived delivers it all with the same ferocity of “Blood on the Tracks.”

Mark Beech for Bloomberg comes right back at him:

If everything on the CD were on a par with the most accomplished numbers, “Modern Times” would be one of Dylan’s best albums and possibly his finest since 1975’s “Blood on the Tracks.” The amount of filler rules this out.

A reviewer in The Daily Orange goes hog-wild with comparisons, coming up positive at first:

One myth about Dylan is his new songs never come close to his old ones, but this is not true. “To Make You Feel My Love,” off of 1997’s “Time Out of Mind,” is as good as any relationship song on “Blood on the Tracks.” In the same way, “Thunder on the Mountain” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break” fit in with the liveliest cuts on “Highway 61 Revisited.”

He goes on to say:

Any reluctance to enjoy Dylan’s new songs is not rooted in their lack of quality, but in their lack of message. The political strife in the world has left a vacuum, and no amount of Conor Oberst singing “When the President Talks to God” can fill the protest-singer shoes of the old Dylan. However, that Dylan is dead, and we are not likely to see the activist, troubadour or drugged out beatnik again. As the song says, he used to care, but things have changed.

(emphasis mine)

Those “protest-singer shoes” of Dylan’s have been empty a long, long time, and I’m not even sure he ever wore them — and certainly not in the way most people think. Yet somehow he always gets called to account by certain critics for not filling them.

Oh, well. Just watch out you don’t get sucked up in that “vacuum” that “political strife in the world has left.”

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