Modern Times
| Bob Dylan
Modern Times
Modern Times is the 32nd studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 29, 2006 by Columbia Records. The album was the third work (following Time Out of Mind and "Love And Theft") in a string of albums by Dylan that garnered wide acclaim from critics. It continued its predecessors' tendencies toward blues, rockabilly and pre-rock balladry, and was self-produced by Dylan under the pseudonym "Jack Frost". Despite the acclaim, the album sparked some debate over its uncredited use of choruses and arrangements from older songs, as well as many lyrical lines taken from the work of 19th-century poet Henry Timrod.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
The music legend returns with a companion piece to 2001's Love and Theft, offering new tracks of jazz-inspired, rockabilly-scamming, ragtime-aping rock'n'roll, more heavily indebted to blues and honky-tonk than Woody Guthrie and Folkways.
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Rolling Stone
Modern Times is something different. It’s less terrifying, less funny on first listen. But it has more command, more clarity. . . . This music is relaxed; it has nothing to prove. It is music of accumulated knowledge, it knows every move, anticipates every step before you take it. Producing himself for the second time running, Dylan has captured the sound of tradition as an ever-present, a sound he’s been working on since his first album, in 1962.
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AV Club Music
It isn't exactly modern, but the jumble of eternal themes and contemporary references is as much a product of its times as anything Dylan has ever done.
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AV Music Club
While not exactly a “happy” or “poppy” record as anyone under the age of 80 would define it, Modern Times is polite, good-time music in the context that Dylan’s musical mind was living in when he made it.
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BBC Music
Backed with verve by his current touring band and beautifully self-produced (under the pseudonym Jack Frost); Modern Times is the exception that proves Bob's recent assertion that most modern music is poorly-recorded pap. It's a warm and utterly engaging album.
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All Music
Modern Times portrays a new weird America, even stranger than the old one, because it's merely part of a world consumed by insanity. In these ten songs, bawdy joy, restless heartache, a wild sense of humor, and bottomless sadness all coexist and inform one another as a warning and celebration of this precious human life while wondering openly about what comes after.
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The Guardian
Dylan's late singing voice has two tones: a croak and a rasp. There's a rasp, even, to his whisper. It's perfect for the subject matter, which is encroaching mortality.
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Slant Magazine
. . . Dylan’s 44th studio effort Modern Times might be the most upbeat feel-bad album of 2006. It’s a melancholy record steeped in uncertainty and the wear of years, crafted by a man whose art has always kept reality at bay. Fusing blues, jazz, and rockabilly, Dylan continues along the same thematic wavelength previously heard on Time Out Of Mind and Love And Theft—morose, defiant, and, as always, lyrically oblique but somehow trenchant.
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Pop Matters
Modern Times is being universally acclaimed as a work of genius, but trying to differentiate between a solid album from an undeniable master and an undeniable masterpiece is getting into Clintonian semantics.
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Tiny Mix Tapes
Modern Times is said to complete a trilogy of albums, combining the macabre Lanois effort, Time Out of Mind, with the rollicking Jack Frost Love and Theft.
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No Rip Cord
This time they're much more relaxed but no less assured. The upbeat tunes don't rock as hard but they don't have to because the grooves are deeper and they draw you right in. I'm here to tell you to buy this album, because it's brilliant, wistful, funny, resigned, angry, chilling, romantic, and most of all, swings like a somanabitch.
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The Skinny
Bob Dylan's last two albums, 'Time Out of Mind' and 'Love and Theft' were critically acclaimed, and 'Modern Times' continues that run, sounding like a mix of those two albums.
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Entertainment Weekly
Recorded with his touring band, it takes much of its musical inspiration from the golden age that predated even his own earliest recordings. There's plenty of good-time rock & roll; two romantic, jazzy swingers; a dash of roadhouse blues; plus a couple of haunting, electric folk songs. Intriguing, immediate, and quietly epic, Modern Times must rank among Dylan's finest albums.
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Prefix Magazine
There’s certainly nothing modern about the classic rockabilly tunes or country waltzes that make up most of the album. If anything, that’s one of its strengths. In bypassing contemporary sounds, Dylan’s songs achieve a level of timelessness — a true measure of any great work of art. Obviously, it takes more than just the transcendence of time to make an album great, and with Modern Times, that greatness is as much the product of what isn’t present as what is.
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Music OMH
. . . this is a new Bob Dylan album. Modern Times marks the conclusion to the trilogy started with Time Out Of Mind and continued with Love and Theft. The great seer returns.
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NOW
But considering the compositional weakness of his declining output and his reliance on cheap ploys like name-dropping Alicia Keys to appear current, the dead-boring results seem more due to natural creative atrophy or just laziness. Not really up to his bank commercial standards.
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Enjoy the Music
This is a back to the roots album. Here you'll find Dylan reinventing Hank Williams, Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Walters, and developing his own new styles based on these influences. There's lots of country, blues, R&B, and Dylan saves the best for last. Yes, the last three tracks are the standouts.
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Itunes Apple Music
Modern Times is a gripping hour inside the psyche of a wise man who, despite a lifetime of searching, finds no sufficient answers to life's biggest questions — a man with no direction home.
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The Monthly
The latest album, Modern Times, is a step down again - albeit a smaller one. Actually, this is a tighter album than Love and Theft; ten songs to that album's dozen, and the roller-coaster turns through the genres are smoother.
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Modern Rock Review
As the 21st century dawned, Bob Dylan had a great resurgence of his legendary career, Modern Times. Many of the songs on this album return to rock, blues and jazz roots, with some tracks based on re-arranged versions of traditional compositions with newly added lyrics.
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No Depression
Flash forward 43 years, and Dylan has never sounded more freewheeling than he does on his new album with the Chaplinesque title Modern Times.
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Slate
Modern Times is a better album than Time Out of Mind and even than the majestic Love and Theft, which by my lights makes it Dylan's finest since Blood on the Tracks (1975). As usual, it's verbose. Dylan pours out verse after verse—aphorisms and parables, jokes and laments, valentines and metaphysical musings—over loose-limbed vamps from his excellent touring band.
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Renowned For Sound
It features and it is influenced by multiple genres, as rockabilly, folk rock and blues. Bob Dylan delivers a majestic performance, both in terms of lyrics and sounds, by portraying his emotions and soul. Listening to Modern Times is as diving into the past, living a journey in a time different from today.
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Hybrid Magazine Music Reviews
The album is more cohesive than either of its predecessors, and slow ballads and earthy blues melt into a reflective meditation on life, love, and passing time. Dylan cuts down on the tongue-in-cheek jokes and asides he scattered throughout Love And Theft, but the veil of mystery that has become his trademark is firmly in place. Still, even at their most impenetrable these songs remain warm and personal.
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Glide Magazine
The Dylan renaissance continues with Modern Times, but of his recent success’s (Time Out Of Mind, Love and Theft) this one seems the most “average Dylan,” which is still leaps and bounds better then most music released this year.
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Entertainment.ie
It may not be the slice of ostentatious ingenuity that some think it is, but Modern Times finds Dylan in fine form and as unwaveringly reliable as ever.
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The RS 500
Modern Times, Dylan’s thirty-first studio record and his third straight masterwork1 // is musically intricate, thick, and expertly played2. // Everything about this album is better than the two that came before3 // As usual, it's verbose4. // Dylan pours out verse after verse—aphorisms and parables, jokes and laments, valentines and metaphysical musings—over loose-limbed vamps from his excellent touring band5.
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The Current
While less musically varied than its eclectic predecessor Love and Theft, Modern Times ranges from the gentle lilt of “Beyond the Horizon” to the boogie of “Rollin’ and Tumblin'” to the minimalist melancholy of “Nettie Moore.” Each song creates a world of its own, and it’s clear that Dylan didn’t waste the half-decade between Theft and Times: the lyrics are diamond-sharp, starting with raucous opener “Thunder on the Mountain.”
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RTE
In short, 'Modern Times' is a good album, but it cannot be considered the equal of the previous two.
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Only Solitaire Blog
However, although there is no reason to deprive Modern Times of its thumbs up rating, I must say that it sounds overreaching, and that, in particular, I do find the running lengths of most of these songs inadequate — even understanding that Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan, takes orders from no one, and has every right to try my patience in asserting his rights to do whatever he wants.
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Robert Christgau
. . . Modern Times is neither as existentially bleak as that piece of fabricated folklore nor as waggish and vivacious as 2001's "Love and Theft." Instead it radiates the observant calm of old masters who have seen enough life to be ready for anything--Yeats, Matisse, Sonny Rollins.
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The Austin Chronicle
Like 2001's Love and Theft, its predecessor, Modern Times is an album that at first feels light but weighs more heavily on the soul with every listen. "I'll make the most of one last extra hour," the 65-year-old vows on "Ain't Talkin'," the album's last cut, and it'd be hard to argue he's done otherwise
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The Channels
His gentle style is still present in cooperation with lulling guitar and bass lines. The soft percussion and the smooth notes dance on the piano. His vocals sound slightly weathered when compared to songs from his older albums, but his unique sound is still as dashing as it was in the 1960s.
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Countdown Kid
It took Bob Dylan nearly five years to follow up on “Love And Theft,” but 2006’s Modern Times was well worth the wait. Once again self-produced and featuring members of his touring band, the album continued Dylan’s amazing late-period hot streak. It has jumping blues tracks, romantic crooner-type material, and a moody, magnificent closing track to send us all off the bed with the covers pulled tight over our eyes.
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Web Wombat
When Dylan first released "Modern Times" in 2006 it was rightly hailed as a cracker of an album by an artist who strides the music world like Colossus.
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The Boston Globe A & E
This understated collection of blues, antiqued ballads, and back-porch jazz is very much about the contemporary world: specifically, how little it has to offer this artist. The 10 songs are everything modern life is not: languorous, spare, and muted, rooted in tradition, and willing to embrace the gloomiest vagaries of faith, philosophy, and love.
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Rockn World Modern Times Reviw
Dylan's raspy, recognizable vocals suck you into a trance-like state, along with song structures that lock you into the songs, and hold you transfixed from start to finish.
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Paste Magazine
After stepping up as producer under his preferred “Jack Frost” pseudonym, Dylan again relied on a palette of bluesy slide guitars and a country-flavored backline. Dylan gets back to the basics for this album, but Modern Times’ 10 tracks don’t ever feel like they could be tagged as just throwbacks.
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Are You On Something.com
The only right way to review this masterpiece, Dylan's tenth or eleventh 100% perfect from start to finish album, is to go song by song, and look at what each one is about.
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
Another "Jack Frost"-produced collection of new tunes, backed by his road band. If possible, this was praised even more highly than Love And Theft - debuted at #1, won a couple of Grammies - and it is better: the band sounds like they actually heard the tunes beforehand, and there are some Bing Crosby-sounding pop ballads ("Spirit On The Water") to balance all the sluggish blues-rock ("Thunder On The Mountain").
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The Daily Beast
With rumbling rockabilly, coming-off-the-rails blues, and grungy use of jazz chords, Dylan packs a wallop here, sounding feisty and ready to kick some ass. The lyrics borrow heavily from classic poetry, folk traditionals, and ’40s balladry—spawning allegations of plagiarism—and Dylan comes off sounding like a prophetic soothsayer with a low, inaudible rumble of doom throughout the record.
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Vinyl Me Please
His most recent albums have been Frank Sinatra covers, while his best album of the ‘00s, Modern Times, mostly reworked blues songs like “Rollin and Tumblin’” and “When the Levee Breaks.” This is the last Dylan album — at least to date — that rocks, kicking almost as hard as his stuff with the Band.
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Bob Dylan: Album by Album
Although Modern Times lacks the electric swagger of "Love and Theft" and borders on being derivative at times, it contains some of Dylan's best work
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Adrian's Album Reviews
You know, overall ‘Modern Times’ may well contain no real musical innovations. Dylan’s voice of course is naturally showing signs of age. Yet he still has that something. Yes sir, that certain indefinable Dylan something. I believe ‘Modern Times’ has that certain something down pretty well.
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Boise Weekly
Though Modern Times, possibly named after the Charlie Chaplin film, doesn't have the dark edge of Time or the variety of Love and Theft, it is a thematically unified album; every song concerns love or mortality or both. Dylan insists he didn't create a trilogy, though, because the first album "doesn't fit."
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