NO REGRETS FROM DYLAN

“KNOCKED OUT LOADED.” Bob Dylan. Columbia.

Dylan has come up with a new album as woozy as its title suggests: It’s no knockout, but it reels with the free-wheeling sense of an artist who’s temporarily forgotten about art. The eight tracks, collected from a variety of sessions over the past couple of years with a variety of bands, have little in common except (a) a raw informality and (b) a non-stop predominance of female gospel-sounding vocals. The arrangements often sound barely planned, the lyrics even more extemporaneous.

Only two of the eight songs are new Dylan solo compositions, and the last thing he seems to care about is putting poetry in motion. When “Lyrics Vol. II: 1986-2009” is published way down the road, don’t expect these funky, often funny rhyme schemes to be among the highlights.

Weak as it often is, though, “Knocked Out Loaded” is heartening in that it marks a move away from the safety zone, back toward the musical recklessness that marked the free-spirited Dylan of the Rolling Thunder era. The album is loose, informal, it’s hard-edged, sometimes even grating, and it doesn’t give a hoot whether you like it or not.

In other words, it’s rock ‘n’ roll.

In the collaboration category, Dylan’s co-authorships with Carole Bayer Sager and Tom Petty fare better than the ballyhooed epic he penned with playwright Sam Shepard (the 11-minute “Brownsville Girl,” a rambling, non sequitur-filled narrative through the Southwest saved by its self-reflexive humor).

The non-originals are also a strange, intriguing lot: a fast, fun rewrite of a Little Junior Parker blues, a martyrs’ song from Kris Kristofferson, a traditional gospel song given a Caribbean feel with steel drums.

Dylan seems to be smiling, or at least smirking, through much of this, probably laughing at his own legend. “You always said people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient and then repent. . .,” he says in the album’s centerpiece. “I don’t have any regrets; they can talk about me plenty when I’m gone.” For better or worse, this inconvenient, musically unrepentant record sounds as if it was made by somebody who really means that.