Meet the new Bob Dylan, the first and still the best. The latest version is gregarious, user-friendly, comfortable with new formats, and, as usual, iconic and enigmatic. Dylan's giving interviews and embracing new technology; the iTunes spot for Modern Times is hip and sexy and swinging, like the record itself. This fall, he's even going to be featured on Broadway in The Times They Are A-Changin, another Twyla Tharp collaboration (didn't she just do one featuring Billy Joel?).

Dylan countercultural? Hardly. But still intractably trendy and provocative.  Modern Times, his 31st album, is very good. So good, it's a pleasure to spin again and again. It's not as dramatic as Time out of Mind, his 1997 "comeback," or as oracular as Love and Theft, the disk (released 9/11/2001) that cemented his reputation once again. But it's more natural than either.

It's topical and elusive, referencing everything from 9/11 to Tommy Tucker to the Five Satins to Alicia Keys; even the economy comes into Dylan's focus, on "Workingman's Blues," and Katrina rears her horrifying head (obliquely, or course) in "When the Levee Breaks," one of the toughest rockers.

At times, Dylan's in love: "I've been sittin' down studyin' the art of love/ I think it will fit me like a glove," he confesses in "Thunder on the Mountain," the surging rocker that launches the album and sets its multifaceted agenda. At the same time, he can be misogynistic: "Someday Baby," the coiled rocker at the center of the album, features lyrics as spiteful and stinging as its music.

Not only is Dylan's writing sharp, he's singing relatively on key (think Nashville Skyline an octave deeper), and this band may be the best he's ever worked with. Leave it to Dylan to assemble a country-rock combo with brushwork-heavy jazz drumming, so the music swings like mad but is soft; move over, Dire Straits. Dylan says it's the best band he's ever worked with (the groups on Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home weren't bad, and there was that gang he worked with called the Band). It's certainly the most sinuous.

The tunes are fine, indeed: "Someday Baby," despite its political incorrectness, is as sexy as "Highway 61," and "Ain't Talkin'," the slowly whirling closer, is fabulously connotative, as if to reconfirm Dylan's ability to say something even when he claims he's mute (the guy's a fabulous kidder). "Rollin' and Tumblin'," Dylan's freshly apocalyptic rewrite of the old Muddy Waters tune, rocks like a train, and "Beyond the Horizon," a ballad in the Leon Redbone vein, is downright dainty.

Are there conclusions to draw from this? No, as usual. Modern Times doesn't seem to be the completion of a trilogy because Time out of Mind and Love and Theft are more thematic. Modern Times, which covers all sorts of terrain, is an album that stands quite well on its own, resonating fresh and penetrating deeply. And it's a distinct pleasure to listen to. May Dylan record more such triumphantly musical albums with this group -- his personal "cowboy band."