Album: Bob Dylan

Love and Theft, Columbia

By the time they reach 60, most performers' work has been rubbed smooth by complacency and compromise, like an eroded stone – particularly if they're harnessed to a tour schedule of around 200 gigs per year. It says much for the seemingly limitless renewability of Bob Dylan's creative gifts that Love and Theft, his 43rd album, should sound as distinctive and intriguing in 2001 as his debut did nearly 40 years earlier. It's one of the most important albums of Dylan's career, being the follow-up to the Grammy-winning Time out of Mind which re-established him as a serious commercial prospect, at a time of life when even Mick Jagger might window-shop longingly for a nice cardie, slippers and a bag of Werther's Originals. And for once in his life, Dylan neither disappoints nor tries to wilfully destroy his reputation, but instead seems energised by the challenge.

These 12 songs are like time-machines: though rooted in traditional blues forms, they're infested with contemporary language and concerns. The effect is to imply a continuum of collective experience linking the present to the past, an acknowledgement that, although the language may change, the emotions and desires remain essentially the same – but to do it with more fun and mischief than that suggests. The fast shuffle opener "Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum", for instance, catapults its nursery-rhyme characters into a contemporary tableaux, Dylan's hipster-jive narrative studded with bizarre detail and modern terms; the banjo-driven flood metaphor "High Water" likewise brings to its apocalyptic struggle something of the surreal, paranoid humour of "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", with Darwin being hunted by the creation-ist High Sheriff out on Highway 5.

The effect is most pronounced on the swingy "By And By", which features Bob crooning, "I'm scufflin' and I'm shufflin' and I'm walkin' on briars/ I'm not even acquainted with my own desires," the antique, mythopoeic echoes triggered by "briars" colliding with the distinctly modern vernacular of the second line. The song itself may sound like the Thirties, but its manner is that of a modern mind informed by centuries-old archetypes – like Bob Dylan, in other words. "Floater", too, finds him employing offhand surreal imagery with a light, jovial spirit and mystic-prankster humour, while the heavier boogie "Lonesome Day Blues" sees him spitting out lines as dazzling and derisory as any of his Sixties classics; who else, then or now, could have come up with a couplet as sardonically devastating as "I'm going to teach peace to the conquered/I'm going to tame the proud"?

Recorded with his touring band,Love and Theft portrays a man at ease with not just his own history, but with popular music history in general. And despite his arduous schedule, the impact of that voice remains undimmed by his exertions; indeed, he's singing more confidently and imaginatively than ever here, switching with facility between blithe, romantic croons and the dark, ragged authority of the harder blues numbers. Count yourself lucky if you're half this vital at his age: once again, the spokesman of a generation is setting the highest standards for any generation to live up to.