Fifty-nine seconds into the opening track of Rory Block’s moving tribute to Bob Dylan, she growls “Everything is broken.” In that instant, over her own swooping slide guitar lines and stomping percussion support, the sense of something important unfolding is manifest. The album’s first two of nine songs—“Everything is Broken” and “Ring Them Bells”—are from Dylan’s spiritually resonant 1989 album, Oh Mercy; the last two—“Mother of Muses” and a 20-minute “Murder Most Foul”—are from his 2020 masterpiece, Rough and Rowdy Ways. In between are one anguished solo acoustic gem from Time Out of Mind (“Not Dark Yet”) and four stone classics beginning with “Like a Rolling Stone.” In her stark readings and instrumental atmospherics, Block does nothing less than heighten what Dylan calls “the dread realities of life”—this, at a time when everything does indeed feel broken. As a blues singer she’s completely tapped into the ancient foundations of Dylan’s songs and, with vision clear and unwavering, takes them all to a place where we hear them, and Dylan, with new ears. The jaunty take on “Mr. Tambourine Man” allows some light into the proceedings but otherwise Positively 4th Street speaks profoundly to a time of darkness ascendant.