About two months ago, Bruce Springsteen brought us The Rising, arguably the first major musical statement on 9/11 and its aftermath.

It was a sermon drenched in the healing waters of trials, tribulations, triumph and redemption, and while political messages occasionally shone through, they were subsumed enough within the overarching love of humanity not to cause any reasonable person any irritation.

Steve Earle, on the other hand, doesn’t play that. It’s not that this great singer/songwriter doesn’t care about humankind as much as his artistic brother from New Jersey, but he also desires to attack the complexities of the past year with a far more political and passionately angry bent.

His new album, Jerusalem, is a complicated record, with hope and redemption fighting for space with darkness and injustice. (It’s also worth mentioning that, at only 36 minutes, it’s neither too long nor padded.) Equally important, perhaps, is the fact that Jerusalem also finds Earle rocking consistently harder on this record than he ever has.

The album opens ominously enough, with “Ashes to Ashes,” a brooding stomp with Biblical lyrics delivered in a near-rap. As fitting an opener as it is, what with its fierce rocking and dark content, the song works least well of any song on the record. It’s by no means a disaster, not even close, but it does start things off on a somewhat auspicious note.

Luckily, it’s followed by “Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do),” which sets up the same musical framework (talking blues backed by guitar-heavy rock and roll, this time a tightly grooving reworking of a classic Stones riff), and pairs it with the most expressly political lyrics on the record.

Rather than merely listing complaints (which he does with righteous indignation), he also turns the spotlight on the activists who’ve given up; the song’s parenthetical title refers both to the sad state we find ourselves in and to the frustrated appeals of those who still support the radical causes that Earle finds such great poetry in.

“Conspiracy Theory” adds another new element to Earle’s vast stylistic canon, adding psychedelic swirl and R&B call-and-response to the thick electric chunk. Once again, Earle grounds the lyrics politically, asking important and pointed questions about assassinations and military policy, only to be answered by a sweet female chorus singing “Hush now, don’t you believe it / Cover your head and close your eyes.” It’s creepy stuff, and it would all be slightly ponderous if not for the intensity of the musical backdrop.

Next comes the infamous “John Walker’s Blues,” Earle’s examination of the so-called “American Taliban.” Over electric folk-blues, Earle sings Islamic blessings and tells the story of a mixed-up American kid, “raised on MTV,” who ends up in the absolute wrong part of town.

Just to clear the air, “John Walker’s Blues” is not a celebration of Walker’s actions, as some ignorant right-wingers have suggested, but rather it is an attempt to reconcile the competing forces of humanity and non-specific fundamentalism. It also serves, somewhat surprisingly, as a great assertion of those who practice the Islamic faith with better intentions.

This streak of explicitly political material is broken with “The Kind,” a brief rumination on storytelling that falls comfortably within Earle’s brand of country-rock. After that, the volume gets cranked up again, first with the organ-driven barrio rock (is there anything, anything, this guy can’t do?) of “What’s A Simple Man To Do?,” which stands as part polemic and part criminal ballad, and then on “The Truth,” a chilling account of prison life from one of that subject’s greatest interpreters.

The next song, “Go Amanda,” a love song co-written with Sheryl Crow, sounds like a great Little Feat outtake. “I Remember You” is the album’s only other weak spot, a nice but totally unremarkable duet with Emmylou Harris.

Jerusalem‘s final two songs are both political: “Shadowland” is a Woody Guthrie-style rumination on what Springsteen calls the “darkness at the edge of town,” an unknown which Earle recognizes both the dangers and the strange promise of. Finally, the album closes with the title track, a stirring anthem in which this great realist best expresses his hope for the future. “I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham/ Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem,” Earle preaches, leaving this near-masterpiece of an album on a note that is neither depressing nor foolishly optimistic.

Steve Earle is an ideological arsonist, setting fire to straw men and scapegoats, casting light on the dark corners of the American dream.

Jerusalem further cements his status as one of the leading artists of our, or any other, era.