The return of the enigmatic Bob Dylan continues. This time last year he was touring in America after an eight-year break, and had just released the (mostly) peaceful and exquisite Planet Waves. Since then there’s been the patchy double album recorded live on the tour, and Dylan’s surprise return to his old record company, CBS.

Now, with (by his standards) an almost obscene haste, he has produced yet another album. It’s called Blood on the Tracks (CBS 69097) and it marks yet another change in his mood and style. It will delight all those who liked the early albums but were baffled by the subsequent developments.

The liner notes, by American writer Pete Hamill, boldly claim that “here is Dylan bringing feeling back home… as personal and as universal as Yeats or Blake,” and for some of the tracks that’s not as wild an assessment as it may sound. But this is not the relatively straightforward young and embittered Dylan returning. It’s the work of a more mature, if again embittered, writer, channelling his feelings through a series of differing songs relating to the same themes - and occasionally throwing in the old puzzles, on what is real and what is not.

Musically, the overall mood is relaxed and melodic, with the all-out rock or country influences giving way to a rhythmic, acoustic style - strummed guitars, harmonica, organ and bass. Lyrically, though, the changes are drastic. If Planet Waves was a collection of love songs, Blood on the Tracks is a collection of songs about love, treated with cynicism, understanding and dry humour. “She was married when we first met, soon to be divorced,” he sings in the first track Tangled Up in Blue, and sets the tone for the album. That particular song sounds like the scenario for an American road movie.

Tangled Up in Blue was the six-minute opener from Blood on the Tracks, written as Dylan’s first marriage was falling apart. BobDylanVEVO

Again in the next tracks, Simple Twist of Fate and You’re a Big Girl Now there’s the same feel, of world-weary battered survival, a bleak fatalistic view of love, but with the sadness offset by the casual shrug or the lightness in the music.

It’s easy - indeed inevitable - to view the songs in the light of the reported rumours on the man’s alleged marital problems. Certainly, there’s a pain here that was never present in Planet Waves or the country-flavoured albums. To say there’s blood on these tracks is something of an indulgent overstatement, but there’s certainly some evidence of sweat and tears. Yet perverse as it may sound to wish one’s favourite artist a life of unrelenting misery, it does seem that a degree of pain helps his writing. There’s a tension in some of the lyrics, a narrative flow and a descriptive ability that has been lacking in some of the songs in recent years. There’s a subtle range of emotions here, too: permanent relationships may come out badly, but that’s not to say he has turned anti-feminist. If You See Her Say Hello is a love song as immediately attractive as Girl from the North Country, but infinitely more mature and emotionally complex.

It’s a fine album, but it still has its weaknesses and puzzles. The second side starts with two tracks in which the themes are repeated almost in exercise form. Meet Me in the Morning is a study in writing a blues - albeit an excellent one - complete with the traditional stock phrases about crowing roosters. In Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts he uses the form of the drawled allegorical narrative over an insistent backing, to tell yet another story about love and fate.

There’s even some confusion in the finest track of all, an extraordinary outburst called Idiot Wind. It begins with what seems like silly personal paranoia (“Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press”), then on to unlikely fiction (“they say I shot a man called Gray, and took his wife to Italy”) before exploding into one of the most brilliant, brutal choruses that Dylan has written.

A screaming chunk of fury, piled up with a jumble of surreal imagery and hints of influences back to Woody Guthrie, it can be taken as an all-purpose anthem against mediocrity in the media and the collapse of America’s idealism. It’s Ginsberg’s Howl revisited, and it marks Dylan as a sixties survivor, bruised but not down.