Consumer Guide Album

Bob Dylan: Modern Times [Columbia, 2006]
It took Dylan five years to create this conservative album even if he laid it down in a week, and I doubt he could have gotten it done at all without cribbing rhetoric from a shallower conservative, Confederate poet Henry Timrod. When not calling his new nation to arms or locating Satan's domicile north of the Mason-Dixon line, Timrod had a gift for genteel sentiment that's essential to the old-fashioned tone here, and Dylan grabbed what he needed. But note the intrusion of his old friend deliberate barbarism when, for instance, Timrod's "logic frailer than the flowers" produces Dylan's "more frailer than the flowers." Without such touches, the conservatism would be stultifying. The blues tropes help, too. Then again, without the '30s pop, the blues grooves would be stultifying. Instead, the entire construction is a thing of grace--conservative, and new under the sun. A+