commercially, Nebraska is also a tactical masterstroke, an inspired way out of the high-stakes rock & roll game that requires each new record to be bigger and grander than the last.

Until now, it looked as if 1973's dizzying The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle would be the last Springsteen album to surprise people. Ensuing records simply refined, expanded and deepened his artistry. But Nebraska comes as a shock, a violent, acid-etched portrait of a wounded America that fuels its machinery by consuming its people's dreams. It is a portrait painted with old tools: a few acoustic guitars, a four-track cassette deck, a vocabulary derived from the plain-spoken folk music of Woody Guthrie and the dark hillbilly laments of Hank Williams. The style is steadfastly, defiantly out-of-date, the singing flat and honest, the music stark, deliberate and unadorned.

Nebraska is an acoustic triumph, a basic folk album on which Springsteen has stripped his art down to the core. It's as harrowing as Darkness on the Edge of Town, but more measured. Every small touch speaks volumes: the delicacy of the acoustic guitars, the blurred sting of the electric guitars, the spare, grim images. He's now telling simple stories in the language of a deferential common man, peppering his sentences with "sir's." "My name is Joe Roberts," he sings. "I work for the state."

As The River closed, Springsteen found himself haunted by a highway death. On Nebraska, violent death is his starting point. The title track is an audacious, scary beginning. Singing in a voice borrowed from Guthrie and early Bob Dylan, he takes the part of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather to quietly sing, "I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we done/At least for a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun." The music is gentle and soothing, but this is no romanticized outlaw tale à la Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd." The casual coldbloodedness, the singer's willingness to undertake the role and the music's pastoral calm make Starkweather all the more horrific.

Springsteen follows with another tale of real-life murder, this one involving mob wars in Atlantic City. With "Nebraska" and "Atlantic City," his landscape has taken on new, broader boundaries, and when he begins "Mansion on the Hill" with a reference to "the edge of town," it's clear that his usual New Jerse