the sadness of middle age, the sadness that has been the wellspring of great rock & roll from Robert Johnson to "Every Breath You Take." Flaming through that sadness is the sort of hell-hound-on-my-trail passion that you'd have to reach back ten years to find in Dylan's recorded work.

Who could have expected so strong a rebound at this late date, especially after such flat, lifeless records as Saved or Shot of Love? Those LPs culminated a process that began with 1975's Desire, wherein Dylan was purging himself of the metaphors and personas that had vaulted him to Sixties sainthood by rendering simple, limpid tales about his personal life. To hear the man of a thousand poses wailing "Sara, oh Sara/Don't ever leave me, don't ever go" couldn't help but tear your heart out -- you could just imagine how much pain Dylan must have been in to bare himself so nakedly.

All the same, it was an artistic dead end. Viewed in that context, Dylan's conversion to Christianity -- and the hectoring records that his conversion spawned -- wasn't so surprising. It was as if he had to adopt someone else's world view in order to replace the stream of figurative language that once coursed through him. But Dylan's audience did not take kindly to hearing their hero parroting beliefs that many of them had already rejected, and the idea of Dylan toeing anyone's party line --even one as uplifting as agape -- inspired some truly hateful responses.

Infidels sweeps away all those problems. In their place is a forty-two-year-old man with a still-keen eye that elegantly documents his world-weariness and frustration at the burdens of the past, but who, like his namesake, is singing in his chains like the sea. It wouldn't be possible without the brilliant backing of the crack band that Mark Knopfler assembled: the rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, Alan Clark of Dire Straits on organ, ex-Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor and Knopfler himself. Knopfler and his fellows have coaxed some careful work out of the notoriously studio-shy Dylan without sacrificing the spontaneity that has always marked his best records.

In the delicate "I and I," Dylan struggles against the weight of old artistic identities, turning the Rastafarian expression for "God and Man" into a meditation on his own changes through time. As a new lover sleeps in his bed, Dylan rolls into a reverie about her