Album review: Bob Dylan: Together Through Life

THEY say that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. Bob Dylan, less than four weeks shy of his 68th birthday, is pretty busy for a pensioner. He is perpetually occupied with the Never Ending Tour, which rolls into Scotland this weekend for the sixth time in a decade. He presents his weekly Theme Time Radio Hour show with great alacrity. He has started to receive recognition as a painter, with commissions stacking up. Presumably, he is at least thinking about following up Volume One of his well-received Chronicles autobiography. So why on earth wouldn't we be anticipating a new album?

Yet Together Through Life, his 33rd studio album, has come unexpectedly hard on the heels of three acclaimed albums – Time Out Of Mind, Love And Theft and Modern Times – which have reignited interest in Dylan as a relevant artist of our times, as opposed to a legendary antiquity.

The latter sold 2.5 million copies worldwide, but Dylan recently remarked of it that "we squeezed the cow dry" and it was time for a shift of direction. The roots of his latest collection came about when director Olivier Dahan (La Vie En Rose) asked Dylan if he would write a song for the soundtrack of his forthcoming film My Own Love Song. Dylan penned Life Is Hard – and then nine more songs, which were quickly captured late last year with Dylan at the controls under his nom de production, Jack Frost.

The results have been compared to the vintage Chicago blues sound of Chess Records but, laced throughout with the soulful accordion playing of Los Lobos' David Hidalgo, are also evocative of Tex-Mex tradition.

The song that started it all stands alone in this company. Life Is Hard is a loping, old-school country jazz croon with a lovely melancholy tune and simple, heartfelt, lonesome lyrics ("since we've been out of touch I haven't felt that much from day to barren day"), delivered with hangdog resignation.

Notably, the lyrics on this album were co-written with poet Robert Hunter, a "non-performing" member of The Grateful Dead, and, according to Dylan, boast "more of a romantic edge". Their grizzled meditations on the pros and cons of love are pretty straight-talking and rewarding. The low-slung blues sashay Beyond Here Lies Nothin' is a love song contented in the moment, while the smokier bar blues of Forgetful Heart laments the cruelty of love's short term memory.

My Wife's Home Town might sound suspiciously like the Muddy Waters/Etta James number I Just Want To Make Love To You in places (Dylan credits the song's composer, Willie Dixon, in the sleevenotes), but the sentiments are very different. The atmospheric arrangement leaves lots of space for bitter reflection on all the trouble the narrator's woman has got him into. "There's reasons for that and reasons for this, I can't think of any just now but I know they exist," he ruminates with a rub of his chin and a droll chuckle.

If You Ever Go To Houston offers some sanguine civic advice over the gentle, repetitive wheeze of accordion – "keep your hands in your pockets and your gunbelt tight… better know where you're going or stay where you are". You don't get that with Lonely Planet guides.

This Dream Of You, the most musically cosmopolitan track on the album, with its tango feel and the Hawaiian twang of the steel guitar, comes sandwiched between two conventional blues numbers, the derivative bar-room bluster of Shake Shake Mama and the strutting Jolene. Dylan has clarified that this is not the same Jolene as Dolly's Parton's nemesis, but she still sounds like a lethal temptress, "making dead men rise".

I Feel A Change Comin' On has a tantalising title. Could this be Dylan's reflection on regime-change in the US? Nope, it's his version of "get your coat, love, you've pulled" as he looks forward, somewhat sluggishly, to good loving ahead. What girl could resist the line "if you wanna live easy, baby, pack your clothes with mine"?

Fans of Dylan the social commentator will instead have to drink their fill from the closing, pithy satire It's All Good, a rather devil-may-care catalogue of social rot, which degenerates from "rest stop kitchen all full of flies" to "cold-blooded killer stalking the town", and comes over like Depeche Mode's Wrong set to the tune of Slim Harpo's Got Love If You Want It. It's a playful yet eloquent end-piece from an artist who is simply taking care of business.