Bob Dylan, Love And Theft

Its title swiped from an Eric Lott book about minstrelsy, its music palmed from a smattering of vintage 78s and 45s, a few of its lines appropriated from a biography of a Japanese gangster, this is 100% a late-model Bob Dylan masterpiece. It's a magpie wonder, slyly observing the millions of little thefts and other injustices that make up the American pop, jazz, blues and country traditions he loves so dearly, even as he adds a few to the pile. His voice is shot to hell, which just makes his jump blues and riverside meditations sound sager, and his lyrical persona is a marvelously cranky, funny old guy, chatting on key as much as he sings — on no previous Dylan album would it have been possible to imagine the phrases "2 a.m. booty call" and "Freddie or not, here I come." And what's he singing about this time? Mostly what to do while everyone's waiting for the Apocalypse to arrive — which it effectively does on the album's centerpiece, "High Water (For Charlie Patton)," a brother to Patton's song about the great Mississippi flood of 1927. In the meantime, there's love, of course, and sparing the defeated, and cracking the occasional joke, and returning to the crackling shellac that keeps the moonlight of the past shining.