In an unusually candid interview Bob Dylan once revealed: “I’m not a playwright. The people in my songs are all me.”

So the real fascination when a new Dylan album arrives is which “me” turns up. Is it the impassioned folk-singer of his first two records, the spaced-out poetic wizard of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde or the angry, broken-hearted lover of Blood On The Tracks? Or is it the Christian, the country troubadour or the mysterious outlaw?

In Tempest, his magnificent new album, it is all of these - as Dylan delves into his back pages to make sense of these dark and depressing times. Specifically he returns to the epic Desolation Row, which is as fiercely immediate now as it was way back in 1965, and weaves a 14-minute hymn to destruction from the doom-laden line "The Titanic sails at dawn". Called Tempest, it dominates the eponymous album and demonstrates, yet again, that Dylan’s staggering understanding of human nature and his magic artistry with words remain undimmed.

Elsewhere, Tempest is both a state of the nation address and an unflinching look at the vagaries of the human heart. Early Roman Kings is a coruscating attack on today’s robber baron bankers, whilst the deceptively lilting Long And Wasted Years is a withering portrait of a loveless marriage. The breezy Duquesne Whistle, co-written with the Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter, uses that favourite Dylan device of a train as a metaphor for life, and is complemented by Scarlet Town, a vividly surreal look at the disintegration of the American dream.

Tempest closes with Roll On John, an unexpectedly moving tribute to John Lennon, once again confounding those critics who believe Dylan is interested solely in his own genius. Overall, Tempest is Dylan’s most complete album, both emotionally and musically, since 1997’s Time Out Of Mind. It is a triumph.