David Skinner, assistant managing editor

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN volunteers for heavy duty with his newest album, "The Rising" (Columbia Records). He pays tribute to the rescue workers who marched into the World Trade Center buildings as they tore and burned and snowed down onto lower Manhattan. He looks to capture the sorrow and shock of waking up to a world as different as the physically altered New York skyline. In another song, the Boss describes the distance between our world and one "'neath Allah's blessed rain." September 11 is everywhere--and nowhere--on this album.

Springsteen has long played the socially conscious rocker. Most famously, on "Born in the U.S.A.," he spoke for veterans returning to the cold embrace of the country that sent them to Vietnam. Later he recorded the doleful title track for the AIDS movie "Philadelphia," and, more recently, he mourned the horrific shooting of Amadou Diallo by New York City's Police Department. All this controversy, however, masks a very controversy-phobic person. For example, Springsteen claimed in "41 shots" not to be criticizing the cops, a difficult position to hold since no one writes songs about accidental shootings, but a position one might try to hold were he afraid of losing his blue-collar creds. This desire to remain in everyone's good standing doesn't serve Springsteen well in approaching the power of September 11. And it makes for great frustration on the listener's part. After all, if Springsteen could be critical of the United States in 1984, why can't he be critical of her enemies today?

But it's not just righteous anger that's missing here. It's war and bitterness and woe, instead of which Bruce Springsteen gives us midtempo sadness. And for him, sadness is simply the opposite of romantic success. Great sadness is therefore a great broken heart.

Saying it like this makes it sound like Springsteen has committed an intellectual misconception, when it is more a matter of emotional habit, his and that of many others. It is not only common but defensible to reference the heart to express the utter dismay felt when one's people suffer a great calamity. Ask our president. But the rhetoric of hearts comes up short just where the terrifying events of September 11 call for something else. Take "Worlds Apart," a strange and oily love song to Islam or Afghanistan or something: "I taste the seed upon your lips, / lay my tongue upon your scars / But when I look into your eyes, / we stand worlds apart." The song, which makes generous use of some singers called Asif Alli Khan and Group, could have the alternate title, "My Little Islam Girl": "Sometimes the truth just ain't enough / Or it's too much in times like this / Let's throw the truth away / we'll find it in this kiss." The rhetoric of hearts, unsupported by the clarity of narrative, becomes nothing more than romantic blathering.

"Empty Sky" states contradictory desires and captures the problem perfectly: "I want a kiss from your lips / I want an eye for an eye." But given the choice between love and war, this album always chooses love. There's no thunder or fury or for that matter any feeling that wasn't already in the Springsteen bank. And those pages from his own book that would have been useful, those communicating desperation and hardship and the feeling of one's head brimming with a hundred difficulties, aren't the ones Bruce is cribbing from today. In short, the new album just doesn't rock. Even the middling catchy pop songs like "Waiting on A Sunny Day" and "Countin' on a Miracle" that are especially light on September 11-related themes, are just kind of wholesomely blue. It's like the whole damn album is waiting to become the soundtrack for the Salvation Army's "One-Year-Later" appeal.