THINGS ARE not looking good. If Bob Dylan is still the weather vane that shows which way the wind is blowing for people of a certain generation - who survived the '60s with braincells and ideals almost intact, at least for a while - then the omens on his most intriguing album for quite a few years point to trouble ahead. The original musical Pope of Greenwich Village has seen many things and lived through even more, but recent reports of heart trouble have him facing mortality with a pressing urgency to dispense some of the wisdom he's accumulated. In the moving, elegiac and laid-back 'Not Dark Yet', he nails his spiritual malaise, careful to add an undertow of bitter been-there-done-that cynicism. Sometimes his burden gets to be more than he can bear, he admits, as a gospelly swamp blues swirls around the lived-in, crackling voice of an old poet, and he doesn't even hear a murmur or a prayer.
"I've been down on the bottom of a whirlpool of lies/I ain't looking for nothing in anyone's eyes", he cackles at one point, and you have to wonder what's riling this quite rich 50-something man so. And the answer is love. 'Time Out Of Mind', on one level, is a collection of 'ma woman done me wrong' songs that indirectly pays tribute to many an unheard old bluesman, and on another is a collection of musings on broken hearts, broken dreams and broken ideals.
The songs slow-crawl with the finest licks money can buy and, surprisingly enough, you can actually commend the uniform vibe of tracks like the opening 'Lovesick' (a declaration of frustration that slowly ebbs away as the songs proceed) and the spooked closer 'Highlands' (which spends 16 often hilarious minutes bemoaning the ageing process and ends in a chance meeting with a waitress in a Boston restaurant).
It's everyday stuff, daily life stuff. 'Cold Irons Bound' is probably the most propulsive of the lot, with an edgy rock'n'roll crunch that complements its chain-gang vibe, but the likes of the sparse 'Dirt Road Blues' and the confessional and somewhat sepulchral 'Trying To Get To Heaven', organ-flecked gospelisms in tow, provide the beating heart of this effort and show where Dylan is at now.
And that's a lonely place. "The party's over," he sings. "I have less and less to say."
Wrong on both counts.