Has Bob Dylan been listening to hip-hop? That’s what it sounded like when he performed some old love songs at City Center on Monday night. While his band played folk-rock, he chanted “Boots of Spanish Leather” in staccato bursts of one note, cramming in syllables before the chord change, and he rattled off verses of “Tangled Up in Blue” like an elocution test, clear and perfunctory. Those old romances were over and done with.
The City Center show ended Mr. Dylan’s fall tour. It was a small-theater concert after a string of arena dates, but Mr. Dylan wasn’t inviting his audience any closer. His voice was generally brusque: mostly from weathering, but also by choice, since every so often he would linger over a note or leap up to a clearer, less crusty tone. He didn’t speak to the audience until he introduced the band near the end of the concert. He was, however, savoring the live versions of songs from his current album, “Modern Times” (Columbia), since he no longer performs songs before they have been released. Mr. Dylan flexes his songs every time he plays them, sometimes applying arbitrary vocal approaches — he was percussive for most of the concert — and sometimes unveiling new glints of meaning. On Monday night, the new songs were the ones that he opened up.
The songs from “Modern Times” can be as familiar as the 12-bar blues and as strange as a fever dream. They are crazy quilts of lovers’ laments and geezers’ reflections, of spiritual vows and archetypal grudges. They start with classic blues lyrics; they quote old poems. (Dylan investigators have found bits of Ovid and the 19th-century American poet Henry Timrod.) Like many traditional blues songs, Mr. Dylan’s new ones add up not to narratives, but to moods: weary, wry, embittered, raunchy, tenacious. On Monday night, he sang mostly about apocalypses: floods, wars and political crackdowns — the set included “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” — with heartbreak on the side.
Mr. Dylan’s current band is cruder than some groups he has led since he ended a songwriting hiatus in the 1990s. It’s best when it charges into a roadhouse blues like “Highway 61 Revisited” and twangs out riffs the way it did on both “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” — which has grown an additional guitar lick since Mr. Dylan took it on tour — and a revamped “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”
The band also dug in with Celtic hard rock, mixing banjo picking and a blunt stomp, in “High Water” and the new “Ain’t Talkin’.” And it did find one contemplative style: in “Nettie Moore,” the asymmetrical, deeply lonely ballad from “Modern Times,” which revolved around a stark bass-drum thump and hovering chords from Mr. Dylan on electric organ, the instrument he played through the set. That organ made “When the Deal Goes Down,” another ballad from “Modern Times,” sound circusy and almost sarcastic.
The concert was another night in a life of steady touring: some hits, some misses, some exploration, some shtick. Tossing off the old songs but probing the new ones, Mr. Dylan was out to seize the present and not look back. “You think I’m past my prime,” he sang. “Let me see what you got.”
