IT SAYS something that a Springsteen album is still an event, more than 30 years after the man once styled The Boss first kicked up a dust storm.

The Springsteen you get today is stripped of the old Boss bombast, preferring to sing narrative anthems haunted by bruised and tattered souls.

For The Rising, Springsteen reunited with the E Street Band for the first time in 15 years in an attempt to analyse America in the wake of 9/11. If the results were, in retrospect, patchy, it was a mostly noble effort from a songwriter who knows better than most how to emote.

On Devils & Dust, Springsteen returns to the low-key, wind-blown territory of Nebraska or The Ghost Of Tom Joad, conveying individual American stories in a ruminative rumble.

Amusingly, he has earned his first "parental guidance" warning sticker, applied because of Reno, a beautifully scratchy roots number which tells, in unflinching detail, of a man's visit to a prostitute, an encounter of little evident pleasure.

The title track, drawn from the deep pessimism that has always been part of Springsteen, is a sombre first-person song from the perspective of a soldier in Iraq. If a melancholy mood settles too over Matamoros Banks and The Hitter, the warm, carnal pleasures offered in Maria's Bed are much more upbeat, almost suggesting Rod Stewart in the good days.

This is an evocative, moving album that, given time, grows in stature. An accompanying DVD features acoustic performances, introduced by the man himself.

Updated: 09:19 Thursday, May 05, 2005