NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — • Bob Dylan

“Modern Times”

Listen to Bob Dylan. Find love.

The sentiment is all over his 31st studio album, a bluesy, rockabilly charmer.

Scarlett Johansson stars in 1950s-style home movies in his new video for “When The Deal Goes Down,” and Dylan’s thinking about Alicia Keys in the opening track, “Thunder on the Mountain.” Yes, he name drops Alicia Keys.

“You think I’m over the hill/You think I’m past my prime/Let me see what you got/We can have a whoppin’ good time,” he sings on “Spirit in the Water.”

At 65, the man still has a lot of life in him.

A lot of the album is undeniably sweet, like on the previously mentioned “When The Deal Goes Down” and “Beyond the Horizon,” which dive headfirst into true love, from now into the afterlife.

Long and winding, most of “Modern Times” is chill-out music from the (likely) greatest songwriter in the history of popular music. Certain songs ramble, but most of them just roll by like a lazy river.

And it’s a good thing, kids (unlike, say, a Jack Johnson album, which invokes sleep before the second track begins). He’s Bob Dylan. He can pull it off.

Some are saying it’s his best album since “Blood on the Tracks.” It could be. It stands next to the urgent comeback of 1997’s “Time Out Of Mind,” where if Dylan wasn’t singing about knockin’ on heaven’s door, he certainly felt like it.

That album was about coming to grips with one’s own mortality. There was a loneliness in the sound. It creeps up again with this album’s closer, “Ain’t Talkin’,” where Dylan sings as a sole survivor, a silent man full of regret and loss, unable to help the world on his own.

That’s the cautionary tale. Much of “Modern Times” says that if you find love, you can love life while it lasts.

It’s easier to accept death if you’re lucky enough to be with that special someone “When The Deal Goes Down.”

Three and a half stars.