THE MISSING.

If there was ever a moment for Bruce Springsteen to take back his place at rock's center stage, this would be it. His last album of new work, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," came out seven years ago, in 1995. After that--despite an extensive world tour in 1999 and 2000--he struggled to find a subject or a sound compelling enough to build an album around. Then came the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. In the months that followed, Springsteen wrote and recorded thirteen new songs; they have now been released, along with two tracks that were written earlier, as an album called "The Rising." This seems to set the stage for a familiar scenario: the rock veteran's triumphant return to relevance, form, and, ultimately, Grammy recognition (see Bob Dylan, Santana, and U2). But instead of writing the album that would undoubtedly have put him back in the spotlight--a "Born in the U.S.A." for the new era--Springsteen came up with something riskier and more surprising, something more than the country's archetypal living rock star fulfilling his obligation as America's rock-and-roll conscience.

From the start, Springsteen's songs have reflected a tension between his obsessive love of rock and his respect for the simple, direct power of folk music, leading to both the majestic scope of "Born to Run" and the quiet intensity and Woody Guthrie-inspired moralism of "Nebraska" and "The Ghost of Tom Joad." Anthemic, operatic epics like "Thunder Road" and "Jungleland" seemed, in their expansiveness, to invoke the complete history of rock and roll, and helped him break through to a mass audience. And songs like "The River" and "Badlands" achieved a near-perfect balance between despair and defiance, drawing as much on John Steinbeck and John Ford as on Chuck Berry. After "Born in the U.S.A." (1984) sold fifteen million copies and established Springsteen as a pumped-up, dressed-down, blue-collar megastar, he pulled back, turning to honed parables of immigrant experience and small-town American life set against intimate musical backdrops. Today, he is among the world's greatest rock icons, but he has had only one album reach No. 1 on the charts since "Tunnel of Love" (1987), and it was a greatest-hits album released in 1995.

"The Rising" sounds like nothing Springsteen has ever done before. Although this is his first studio album in eighteen years to draw on the full power of the E Street Band, its producer, Brendan O'Brien, didn't go for a live, classic-rock-band approach. Instead, Springsteen sings over dense, constructed blocks of sound, heavy on strings and stacked guitars, light on Clarence (Big Man) Clemons barroom sax solos. His voice seldom rises to that strained, fever pitch familiar from his arena concerts. The lovely, gentle sway of "You're Missing" is one of the most delicate tracks he's ever recorded, whereas the Middle Eastern texture and slashing guitar of "Worlds Apart" bring to mind Sting or Peter Gabriel. Even "Mary's Place," the one song on the album that sounds like a classic E Street "Rosalita"-style barn burner, never reaches the rave-up heights we expect. The song, which describes a gathering at a party or a bar, comes to a break about two-thirds of the way in, and turns into a chorus singing "Turn it up!" This is the part in a Springsteen song when the music should lift off irresistibly--but nothing happens. The chorus repeats for a few more minutes and then fades out, as if Springsteen just can't find a way to give in to joyous rock-and-roll release.

The lyrics are even more atypical than the sound. All the signature Springsteen narrative and detail has been stripped out: there is not a single Joe Roberts or Bill Horton wrestling with his conflicts, no Crazy Janey or Magic Rat, no working on the highway or racing in the street. The language is bare, almost generic; words and images repeat from song to song. The five songs that most explicitly evoke the attacks--"Into the Fire," "Empty Sky," "You're Missing," "The Rising," and "My City of Ruins"--reduce the events to an anonymous domestic fragment ("Just an empty impression / In the bed where you ...