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What should we expect from Bob Dylan in 2012? After 50 years on the road, it is surely remarkable that rock’s greatest and most revered lyricist is still going at all, let alone fiercely engaged with music, still performing hundreds of gigs a year, still writing and recording. Tempest, released by Columbia Records next week, will be Dylan’s 35th studio album. What is even more remarkable is that it is among his best ever.

If there has been a criticism of Dylan’s later work, it is that the lyricism only rarely touches the poetic heights of his classic Sixties and Seventies songs. He has had a tendency to write in simple, bluesy rhyming couplets with phrases liberally borrowed from traditional songs. There is a sense of patchwork in which tension often derives from collision and contrast, the friction of ideas, characters and images rubbing up against each other in places where you are not quite sure they really belong. While Tempest maintains some of this jackdaw sensibility, Dylan sounds genuinely fired up by the possibilities of language. The whole album resounds with snappy jokes and dark ruminations, vivid sketches and philosophical asides.

“They battened down the hatches/But the hatches wouldn’t hold” Dylan warns on the title track, with something like a chuckle of relish discernible in his stretched leather voice. There is a storm raging throughout this album, metaphorically and literally. On a deceptively bright and breezy opening track, rattling railroad song Duquesne Whistle, Dylan hears the train’s whistle speak with the sweet voice of “the mother of the Lord” and scream “like the sky’s going to blow apart”. Right there, in the confluence of religious faith and apocalyptic portent, Dylan establishes themes on one of his darkest, bloodiest and most foreboding collection of songs, set in a barren landscape of Godless self-interest, moral equivocation and random violence. It is a world where you can always find “another politician pumping out the ----” and “another angry beggar blowing you a kiss” (Pay in Blood).

“I think when my back was turned/ The whole world behind me burned” Dylan drawls on the magnificently bleak Long and Wasted Years. Lovers betray and murder one another, men of God swear vengeance and devils stalk the land in the guise of bankers and salesmen wearing “shark skin suits/Bow ties and buttons and high-top boots… Meddlers and peddlers, they buy and they sell/They destroyed your city, they’ll destroy you as well” (Early Roman Kings).

The perspective of Dylan’s narrator constantly blurs and shifts, moving from world-weary cynicism to sorrowful compassion to the morbid glee of a fire-and-brimstone preacher perversely satisfied that, as predicted, the worst has come to pass. As the firebrand of social protest in the Sixties, Dylan was sometimes hailed as a lyrical prophet leading the young generation to a better future. In his 71st year, he seems more like an Old Testament figure, proclaiming the end is nigh. The times they have a-changed, indeed.

Tempest is certainly his strongest and most distinctive album in a decade. The sound is a distillation of the jump blues, railroad boogie, archaic country and lush folk that Dylan has been honing since 2001’s Love and Theft, played with swagger and character by his live ensemble and snappily produced by the man himself.

A notoriously impatient recording artist, Dylan seems to have found a style that suits his working methods. Drawing on the early 20th-century Americana that first grabbed his attention as a young man (and that he celebrated in his Theme Time Radio Hour shows) and surrounding himself with slick, intuitive musicians capable of charging these nostalgic grooves with contemporary energy, his late-period albums

seem a continuation of his tours, as if he rolls right off the stage and into the studio and just keeps rocking. It is a process that seems to unlock something in him, enabling him

to keep firing out lyrics, and not worry too much about the bigger picture. As he recently told Rolling Stone, it is a working method where “anything goes and you just got to believe it will make sense”.

The 54 verses of the epic title track are crammed with lyrical delights. The captain of a sinking ship catches his reflection in the glass of a compass and “in the dark illumination, he remembered bygone years/ He read the Book of Revelation, filled his cup with tears”. Melody and rhythm all fit sleekly and snugly with the lyrics, and Dylan’s gargling, croaking old voice is right out front, delivering each line with precision and expression.

The ship in question is the Titanic, whose fate Dylan conjures up like a nightmarish dream, a disaster containing “every kind of sorrow”. Dispensing with the historic iceberg, Dylan depicts the great ship almost sinking under the weight of its own hubris, while chaos and confusion reign on board, “brother raised up against brother/ They fought and slaughtered each other”. “People are going to say, 'Well, it’s not very truthful,’ ” Dylan recently conceded. “But a songwriter doesn’t care about what’s truthful. What he cares about is what should’ve happened, what could’ve happened. That’s its own kind of truth.” In Dylan’s hands, the ship becomes a metaphor for man’s fatal self-aggrandisement. Performed as a jaunty waltz, Dylan evokes the disaster with almost comical indifference to the fate of “the good, the bad, the rich, the poor/ The loveliest and the best”. The only solace he offers to the bereaved “who waited and the landing and tried to understand” is that “There is no understanding/ For the judgment of God’s hand”.

Everywhere on Tempest, people come to a bad end, often quite grotesquely, being strangled, stabbed, garrotted and drowned. On the mesmerising nine-minute Tin Angel, Dylan relates a terrible tale of adultery, murder and suicide over a slippery double bass riff. There is, to be fair, love and compassion on offer too. Indeed, the album concludes with Roll On, John, a gorgeous, shaggy, sweetly sentimental paean to John Lennon, yet there is little to suggest Dylan shares his old comrade’s notion that love might save us all. “Help comes”, Dylan drily notes as he piles up little cruelties in the magnificently bleak Scarlet Town, “but it comes too late”.

Tempest could be depicted as an album about the testing of belief in extreme circumstances but Dylan maintains enough ambivalence so that you are not always sure where his allegiance really lies, singing with dreamy relish of a place where “love is a sin and beauty is a crime/ All things are beautiful in their time/ The black and the white, the yellow and the brown/ It’s all up there for you in Scarlet Town”.

It is a song the equal of anything in Dylan’s canon, on an album of hidden corners and secret thrills. Fifty years after he first exploded the boundaries of songwriting, rock’s greatest ever lyricist is keeping a tight grip on his crown.

Tempest is released by Columbia records on Monday