Lucinda Williams: Essence. From the very first this sounded better than Car Wheels on a Gravel Road -- she has achieved an astonishing vocal clarity and sincerity, despite or perhaps because of her quaver. So while comparison listening concedes that Car Wheels has more ambitious and sweeping songs, she puts this more first-person batch over on sheer conviction. Nor are the songs trifles: "Out of Touch is no less than the flip side to "We Have the Technology" (Pere Ubu). The only thing I want to know is why she shied away from "Get Right With God" when she played Wichita. Bob Dylan: Love and Theft. Every review starts with "the best Dylan album since . . ." -- you'd think some smartass would fill in the blank with Time Out of Mind, his equally acclaimed but quickly forgotten 1997 comeback. Even today it seems obligatory to refactor everything Dylan does in terms of his classics, yet doing so yields little more than hyperbole. It might be better to refactor his past in terms of where he is now, for what Love and Theft really is is his most entertaining album . . . ever. The improvement over Time Out of Mind is easy to spot: the music's looser and the lyrics are not only memorable, they're delightful. ("Why don't you break my heart one more time, just for good luck?") But this is hardly a huge leap forward; the fact is that damn near everything Dylan has done since, roughly, The Traveling Wilburys (1988) has been pretty good. This should have been easier to spot: despite all the erstwhile stars in the Wilburys, it was blatantly obvious that the only real talent there was Dylan. But where the Wilburys ruse gave Dylan the opportunity to pretend he was not The Oracle, it's taken over a decade for him to shake his myth. The clue here is that while Time Out of Mind harkened back to Blonde on Blonde, all the way down to the interminable finale, there are no past models for Love and Theft. Perhaps Dylan always was just a songster. What's so wrong with that?