Bob Dylan
Love and Theft
Columbia

Each new Bob Dylan album ushers in an explosion of praise and hyperbole, much of it founded more on past works than present ones. When Time Out of Mind won the Grammy in 1997 for Best Album — regardless of that album's considerable merits — it felt bogus, as though some bigwig wanted to give out a lifetime achievement award to boost his own credibility. All the awards and cover stories are irrelevant if the material itself is no good. Fortunately, Dylan can and will withstand the hubbub; his work is that good.

Like Time Out of Mind, Dylan's latest album, Love and Theft, is a work of real substance. Unlike Time Out of Mind, though, this album manages to have fun. In the process, it tours all sorts of musical genres, from jazzy, pre-war pop to hard blues and rockabilly. Still, Love and Theft revolves around Dylan's peculiar take on the blues. He recounts his misfortunes seriously but can't help being amazed by the absurdity of it all. The result is a record with remarkable perspective, full of honesty, humor and beauty.

The record's 12 songs showcase a number of Dylan personae: the energized narrator ("High Water"), the weary traveler ("Mississippi"), the slighted lover ("Cry a While") and the laid-back entertainer ("Bye and Bye"), among others. But Dylan's characters never function as masks. Instead, they serve the mood of the individual songs, adding dimension to his ideas and feelings.

The record opens with "Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee," a shuffling, percussive number about two rambling jokers. Like many of the songs on the album, there's little in the way a linear story; it draws instead on scattered themes, surreal imagery, and evocative vignettes — comparisons to The Basement Tapes are well-founded. The next song, a flowing country ballad called "Mississippi," is the latest in a long line of rustic Dylan journeyman songs and is the most classically "Dylan" song on the album; its propulsive melody rises and falls through the long verses of misadventure and mixed emotions. The upbeat blues number "Summer Days" spotlights the singer's superbly cracked voice. The frogs in his throat have learned to sing, freeing him to become one of the bluesmen he's always emulated.

"Moonlight" explores an old-timey pop vein and finds Dylan crooning with remarkable charm. On "High Water" he weaves a mythical tale of impending doom, set in Clarksdale and Vicksburg and starring characters like Charles Darwin and Fat Nancy. The song once again proves that no one evokes a sense of foreboding better than Dylan:

Highwater rising, rising night and day
All the gold and silver are being stolen away
Big Joe Turner looking east and west from the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing Standing there, highwater everywhere

"Po Boy" is a cute, laid-back song. It has a pretty melody and a corny joke about room service ("send up a room"). The band rocks with reckless abandon on "Honest with Me," somehow sounding energized yet bleak. As witnessed here and throughout, Dylan's found the perfect band. On this, their first collaboration, they make soulful and rich American music.

Love and Theft ends with its most earnest and significant song, "Sugar Baby." For the finale, Dylan sheds his guises and delivers a statement both personal and universal. As on other tracks, the lyrical device is a rebuke of some floozy. Though he claims, "there ain't no limit to the amount of trouble women bring," he later affirms that "love is not an evil thing." At one point, Dylan soberly declares, "every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick, happiness can come suddenly and leave just as quick." But to Dylan's credit, he refuses to end the album on a glum note. Instead, with the final lines, heaven comes crashing down:

Your charms have broken many a heart, and mine is surely one.
You've got a way of tearing the world apart, love see what you've done.
Just as sure as we're living, just as sure as you're born,
Look up, look up, seek your maker, Gabriel blows his horn.

After 11 songs that deal with the scope of human trouble and talent, is this a call to judgment? Surely. Dylan not only lays the human predicament startlingly bare, he admits its necessary consequence and hints at its possible solution. Stunning.

A lot of people buy Dylan's albums because they feel they should, not because they actually want to. In the case of Love and Theft — required listening of the highest order — maybe that's OK.

— David Zahl (zahlie@hotmail.com)