It can only be Bob Season. This past Tuesday, Bob Dylan's 44th album, Modern Times (Columbia) was released, but just you wait. The deciphering and the furrowed-brow analyses have only just begun. Nowadays — between the memoirs and the Scorsese-helmed documentary and the satellite radio show and the constant touring — it might seem like every day is like Bob Season. But nothing can quite compare to a new Dylan album — provided it's not one of the cruddy ones.

The rock-crit party line on Modern Times has already coalesced around the seeming anachronism of the title. After all, like Dylan's previous studio disc, "Love and Theft" (2001), the album contains bluesy shuffles and soft-shoe ballads, like Dylan is trying to conjure a vanished world of song at will. Again, he's produced the spartan album himself under the nom de plume Jack Frost. And once more, Dylan and his band are pictured in the album art wearing gangster-cowboy threads; now it looks like they've been riffling through Deadwood's wardrobe department.

But in many ways, Modern Times is as reliably concerned with the here-and-now as anything Dylan has ever made. The album traffics in some of Dylan's favorite themes: the headiness of love (and lust) and its bitter aftertaste; the inevitable corruption of the powerful; and, of course, the looming End Times. But the way he segues among these leitmotifs within single songs, such as "Thunder on the Mountain" and "When the Deal Goes Down," feels particularly attuned to the zeitgeist.

Modern Times also rewards close listening. (Believe it or not, it sounds especially swell on an iPod.) Dylan and the other musicians have concocted a much more muted sound than on "Love and Theft" — there are no barn burners here on the level of "Lonesome Day Blues" or "Honest with Me." The reason for this modus operandi becomes abundantly clear on a ballad like "Spirit on the Water." The clipped guitar riffs and brushed drums abdicate the spotlight to Dylan's voice, and he can still convey nuances of feeling with that hollowed rasp of his. "Workingman's Blues #2" and "Nettie Moore" should serve as a sharp rebuke to anyone who thinks Dylan isn't really interested in writing and singing anymore. The last track, the eight-and-a-half minute "Ain't Talkin'," displays a sense of foreboding that connects it to Time Out of Mind (1997) and his lost masterpiece of the '80s, "Blind Willie McTell."

Also released on Tuesday, Bob Dylan 1966-1978: After the Crash (Chrome Dreams) is a British DVD documentary that just screams "unauthorized," from the ninth-generation copies of performance clips from the Isle of Wight Festival and The Johnny Cash Show, to the noticeable dearth of any substantial, actual Bob Dylan music. But After the Crash, devised in conjunction with UK Dylan fan mag Isis, makes the most of its Ken-Burns-on-a-tight-budget production values by featuring Dylan chroniclers like Clinton Heylin and Patrick Humphries, and underrated former collaborators such as mid-'70s bassist/bandleader Rob Stoner.

The film succeeds simply by being a thorough (at almost two hours) examination of one of Dylan's most compelling eras — one that Scorsese's No Direction Home completely ignored — when his status as the foremost rock artist suffered blows, and he responded with career apexes like Blood on the Tracks (1975) and the Rolling Thunder Revue.

If you're looking for something more comprehensive, well, you certainly can't go wrong with The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Continuum Books). Written by another well-respected Dylanhead from England, Michael Gray, the book is meticulously researched and, like most Dylan books worth your while, deeply weird. Yes, there are the expected entries (Baez, Joan; "Like a Rolling Stone"). But what should one make of "co-option of real music by advertising, the" or "musicians' enthusiasm for latest Dylan album, perennial" or "Jesus v. Springsteen"? Gray, like Greil Marcus and Clinton Heylin, is as idiosyncratic and opinionated as you'd expect from someone who's spent huge chunks of time studying Bob Dylan's life and music. If you're not fully immersed in the inner workings of Dylanology, the book can feel like another planet, one with a fair amount of vitriol unleashed on Pete Seeger, heady attention paid to the forgotten Dylan album Under the Red Sky (1990) and the occasional very absurd proclamation ("those who find Bob Dylan interesting and those who find David Bowie interesting are almost wholly different groups of people"). But if you're more than a little curious, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, insightful and witty, is a handy Bob Season guidebook. (Though I hear the Bible's good for that too.)

(m_pelusi@citypaper.net)