Music

It’s been a good year for rejuvenated grandadrock, what with Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen both popping out albums that could rightly be described as sprightly. Now the old phoney himself has delivered a disc so close to frisky it might be the first Bob album you could conceivably dance to. He starts with three pearls: ‘Thunder On The Mountain’, which namechecks Alicia Keys to a Tennessee Three chug-a-chug rhythm; the Texan waltz of ‘Spirit On The Water’; and the spiky blues of ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’.

Throughout, his themes are part-biblical, part-libidinous – ‘she ain’t no angel and neither am I’, he promises in the opener, before adding ‘some lazy young slut has charmed away my brains’ in ‘Rollin’…’. This Dylan knows his age and the weaknesses that come with it, but he ain’t that ashamed, or even close. There’s also pop-eyed belligerence, most notably on ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’. A nod to Merle Haggard, this fierce ballad of blue-collar resilience is matched in scale only by the epic ‘Ain’t Talkin’’, in which a scowling Dylan walks through a blasted landscape in search of salvation to an accompaniment that references ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’. It’s a hair-raising, apocalyptic sprawl, and a fitting climax to an excellent album: the next best thing to the second volume of ‘Chronicles’.