Working-men blues Sweating to the oldies with Bruce Springsteen and Trent Reznor BY MATT ASHARE
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Will the real Bruce Springsteen please stand up? I’ve been trying to find him somewhere in Devils & Dust (Columbia), his new semi-acoustic DualDisc collection of a dozen new songs and a short-film video in which he plays five of those tunes with only acoustic accompaniment. It hasn’t been easy. Is he the righteous haunted soul who contemplates suicide on the disc’s title track? Or the broken man who makes an earnest pass at a divorcee in "All the Way Home"? Is he the faithful lover with the fragile falsetto driving "a barbed-wire highway" on a long trip home to his sweet woman in "Maria’s Bed"? Or the deep-voiced shady character detailing an encounter with a prostitute and earning the Boss his first parental-advisory sticker in "Reno"? There’s also the hard-riding dude in "Long Time Comin’ " flying down some moonlit highway with a "catch of roses" for his old girl Rosie, only this Rosie’s "cracklin’ like crossed wires" and this time he’s gonna get it right because if he "had one wish in this god forsaken world, kids, it’d be that your mistakes would be your own." And there’s the old, broken-down boxer who drops names (Jack Thompson, John McDowell) like broken teeth in "The Hitter," and the doomed Mexican border crosser who seems to know the geography of the American Southwest like the back of his hand in "Matamoros Banks."

Three decades after he was christened "rock and roll future" by Jon Landau, who’d just seen some kid from New Jersey play a tiny Cambridge club, in the pages of a paper quite like this one, Springsteen is sounding more and more like some distant, mythic past. That’s no dis. The first George Bush didn’t even know how supermarket scanners worked, much less what a working man pays for a gallon of milk. His son fakes it better than most. But Springsteen’s a different breed altogether. He’s sold millions of albums, played huge arenas worldwide, and made more than a comfortable living in the process. The bubble he lives in can’t be easy to penetrate, and it’s not as if he could walk into any old Stop and Shop for a gallon of milk without threatening to start a riot. And yet, as he’s aged, he’s taken on the trappings of the mythic American troubadour — the scruffy, rootless singer-songwriter who travels from town to town, taking odd jobs where he can get them, making friends where he can find them, collecting stories and turning the fabric of a humble work day into poetry about the human condition. Every song on Devils & Dust sounds lived in. And he fleshes out the characters who populate those songs with real-life details that you don’t trip across on your way to a stadium stage or in the corridor of a million-dollar mansion — the blueberry wine the migrant farmworker sips in the back of a flatbed Ford in "All I’m Thinkin’ About," the rates ("two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty up the ass") the call girl in "Reno" quotes, the smell of mesquite in the air in "Long Time Comin’."

If Springsteen’s to be trusted — and there may be no more trustworthy troubadour in rock today — he goes out on his bike and rides the same streets and highways he imagines his characters do. And like a writer bent on not just getting the story but capturing the accents and the moods, the sounds and the smells of his subjects, he has a talent for taking it all in. Given his rock-star status, that’s a minor miracle. That he’s then able on an album like Devils & Dust — my favorite since Nebraska — to craft coherent character sketches that weave his own passions into epic little stories that convey the dryness of the desert, the feel of a finger on a trigger, the longing for the comfort of a lover’s arms — the very stuff of life — is what will always set him apart from his peers. If he still has any.

I’m still looking for he real Bruce Springsteen on Devils & Dust, and I can’t find him in any one song. But there have always been at least two Springsteens: the pumped-up guy in tight denim jeans dancing clumsily in the Technicolor dark to the overly anthemic crescendi of the E-Street Band on MTV, and the understated author of Nebraska singing stark and ragged songs about the cracks and fissures in an eroding American dream. To that you could add a third in the eager young rocker Landau encountered, but I’m not old enough to remember him. And there will always be the "Born in the U.S.A." Boss misappropriated by Reagan as some jingoistic yahoo after he’d written what may be the most misunderstood hit song of all time. Springsteen wasn’t blameless for that little mix-up: as he belatedly realized, when people rally round a chorus as bombastic as "Born in the U.S.A.," they often miss the subtleties of the verses.

An album like Devils & Dust — with its spare musical backdrops courtesy of drummer Steve Jordan and producer/bassist Brendan O’Brien, a little pedal steel here, a little trumpet there — is built to diffuse the blind patriotic pride "Born in the U.S.A." evoked. It’s less self-consciously literary than 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad (Columbia), and catchier, too. But don’t let its soft acoustic façade or a bright, sing-along chorus like "All I’m thinkin’ about is you, baby" fool you: Devils & Dust has teeth and soul and suffering and beauty and joy and desire. Springsteen feels your pain — or rather, the pain of a full spectrum of people he’s never met but somehow seems to know. And he deals with themes so universal, you don’t have to identify with every character to get the point. It’s Springsteen who does the identifying. He loses himself in his characters, creating the illusion, if only for a minute or two, that he’s that guy sipping blueberry wine.

The spell is broken on the B-side of Devils & Dust, in the five-song DVD mini documentary that places our hero on a set fabricated to look like some anonymous abandoned home that could be right down the street from where you live. "You’re supposed to disappear into the voice of the person you’re singing about," Springsteen explains before taking a seat in the corner of a room and picking at the strings of a beat-up acoustic guitar with only the tap of his boot and the occasional harmonica solo to keep him company. Here he’s just a guy with a gift, another strummer with a song to sing. And that’s good enough for me, because in the end, the only Springsteen that matters is the one you hear on Devils & Dust.

TRENT REZNOR may be a complicated guy dealing with complicated problems in a complicated world. But it’s always been easy to find that guy on the albums he records as Nine Inch Nails. It’s been six years since the last one, the bleak (even by Reznor’s bleak standards) double album The Fragile (Interscope), and apparently he’s been to Hell and back yet again, as he details in a recent Spin interview. This time, substance abuse was the culprit. "I was clearly trying to kill myself" is the quote Spin pulled for the cover. But you’ll find the same old Reznor wrestling with the same old demons on NIN’s new With Teeth (Interscope). If Springsteen specializes in character studies that get under the skin of his subjects, Reznor’s talent is in bearing his soul in ways he hopes will get under your skin. He wants you to feel his pain, and he’s good at it. With Teeth is a timely reminder of just how good, not because he tells good stories but because in our digital world of sonic manipulations he’s a master at creating synthetic soundscapes that both echo and amplify the pain, the debasement, and the ugliness he sees when he looks inside himself. Reznor’s the ultimate narcissist. But it’s not beauty he sees in the mirror.

There isn’t a single song on With Teeth that isn’t sung from the first person or doesn’t drop the "I" word often enough to make it clear whose point of view we’re getting. "You better take a good look because I’m full of shit," he points out in "You Know Who You Are?"; "I am the plague/I am the swarm," he warns when he gets a bit poetic in "The Collector"; "I think I’m losing my grip/But I can still make a fist," he growls in "Getting Smaller." In "Every Day Is Exactly the Same," he worries, "I used to have a voice/Now I never make a sound."

In fact, Reznor’s voice is all over With Teeth, multi-tracked to shock as he answers his close-miked whispers with blood-curdling screams from some digital abyss. And making sounds — make that grand, epic soundscapes — is Reznor’s peculiar gift. The words themselves hardly matter until he locks into a mantra like the "I’d rather die than give you control" chorus of his first hit, "Head like a Hole." Even then, they’re no match for the music — the mechanical beats, the lonely piano chords, the thundering bass distortion, the massed guitars, the house-of-horrors synth tones, all mixed with machine-like precision to create a nightmarish techno-industrial-complex mirror of Reznor’s broken inner world. This guy has no peers when it comes to making post-industrial pop. And he seems determined to remind us of that on With Teeth.

The disc opens with the sparely mixed "All the Love in the World," which echoes the tricky techno rhythms of "Head like a Hole" before moving on to harsher soundscapes: distorted "Don’t you fucking know who you are?" screams, the relentlessly hammering drum patterns of "The Collector," the atonal power chords of the title track, the deliberate pacing of the rhythm track that supports "Sunspots." You hardly notice the feedback looping its way through "Beside You in Time."

But there’s more to With Teeth than flawless production. If Springsteen has become a master storyteller who goes out in the world to study little details like the speech patterns of his characters, then Reznor is the tortured artist as martyr, defiling himself so he can turn the microscope back on himself and let us all know what the blackest of souls really looks like. His are songs of the self. Depressing, perhaps, but no less so than the guy in "Reno" looking for salvation in the arms of a prostitute who’ll take it up the ass for an extra 50 bucks. Yet like the characters Springsteen invents for his songs, the Trent Reznor of NIN is a construct, a caricature of the tortured artist that’s only half as deep as the musical backdrops it inhabits. The final irony may be that the imaginary characters who live and breathe in the grooves of Devils & Dust are more fully developed than the real Reznor who bares his soul on With Teeth.

Nine Inch Nails appear this Thursday and Friday, May 12 and 13, at the Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place in Boston, with the Dresden Dolls; call (617) 228-6000. Bruce Springsteen appears at the Orpheum May 20; that show is officially sold out.