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There is an unreasonable amount of expectation that comes with greatness, and nothing short of a magnum opus is what people have come to expect with each new Bob Dylan release.

I’ll save you the suspense, latest album Together Through Life is hardly his best effort, but of course none of that really matters, because an army of music critics (each more pretentious than the next) will inevitably convince themselves that this is in fact the Bob Dylan album to end all Bob Dylan albums, and will liken it to the discovery of penicillin or the painting of the Sistine Chapel.

However, this is no miracle cure, no masterwork on the scale of “La Pieta” or Picasso’s “Guernica”.

It’s just another mediocre album from a musician that has only been passably good for the previous three decades.

Make that same statement in the presence of any audiophile and they’ll soil themselves with anger, because in their eyes Dylan can do no wrong, he is an infallible vessel touched by God himself, and endowed with the preternatural ability to write songs.

In fact, I would argue that he is the single greatest lyricist to emerge from the medium of music, but none of that dismisses him from his current failings as a washed musician long past his prime.

If Dylan were your average dive bar musician with no career ambitions, he would be openly mocked for his repetitive use of old blues standards and sandpaper vocals which resemble the dying gasp of a barn yard animal.

“That’s just the expressiveness of his voice,” a nameless balding pseudo intellectual would assert. “He’s the voice of the everyman and the living embodiment of their struggle.”

Yeah you keep telling yourself that.

Such is the case on “Life Is Hard” where a now withered Dylan attempts to croon to his lady love and convince her to stay by his side, but instead drives her further away with his piercing shriek.

Then again, Dylan is no ordinary musician, as his every move is scrutinized and dissected by a rabid fan base who insists on each song having meaning and purpose, because without it their lives would cease to exist and merely become hopeless voids of moral ambiguity.

Songs about a heavy downpour and an approaching cold front ultimately become grim portents of a nuclear winter.

Through no fault of his own, Dylan has become a larger than life figure in American folklore, so much so that even first single and opening track “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’”, which shares an eerie resemblance to the theme song of the brilliant HBO crime drama The Wire, passes for an inspired and truly groundbreaking composition that will undoubtedly influence future generations to come.

Perhaps therein lies the true genius of Dylan, whom after amassing a catalogs worth of career defining works in Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks and my personal favorite Highway 61 Revisited, can take a sh*t on a blank canvas and call it art.