Apparently 2000’s The Battle of Los Angeles took quite a toll on poor Tom Morello and his good ol’ gee-tar. As he raged alongside his bandmates on what would be their last full-length, who knew that his custom Fender was echoing some of its final creative riffs and otherworldly sounds.

Aside from his tenure with Audioslave and the handful of Rage Against the Machine reunion gigs in the last year or so, Morello has primarily downshifted to the acoustic side of things, conjuring his Springsteen-worshipping alter ego the Nightwatchman.

Building on 2007’s One Man Revolution, Morello dishes out another helping of politically-charged tunes for the oppressed on Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman’s The Fabled City. Unfortunately, too many things on The Fabled City go awry, and the listener is left with a record that contains a lot of unnecessary studio polish and is relatively devoid of any significant creativity.

Sounding like a Johnny Cash impersonator channeling The Boss, Morello plods through 11 tracks of ho-hum folk-rock, leaving an unmemorable mess in his wake. Last year’s One Man Revolution, while not groundbreaking, at least matched the music to its title. It was rougher around the edges, and Morello sang with more instinct than calculation. This time around, the added backing musicians and that “Pro Tools sheen” only detract from the persona of a rebel with both a guitar and a bone to pick.

The opening track, “The Fabled City,” gives a pretty good idea of what’s to follow, attending to a verse-chorus-verse structure with a short buildup mixed in haphazardly. “Whatever It Takes,” the lone track used to advertise the album on The Nightwatchman’s official website, provides one of the few bright spots on The Fabled City, offering a clap-worthy chorus and resonating solo — both of which are conspicuously absent from the rest of the album.

Morello sings in a baritone that’s generally pleasant, and he uses the lyrics to form a unique narrative representing a different oppressed individual for each song, at times speaking as a Guantanamo Bay detainee or a victim of Hurricane Katrina, or as The Nightwatchman himself.

But the delivery of clever lines like “The devil is not the king of hell/ A violent dance on slippery stones/ The line’s gone dead/ We’re all alone,” sounds forced and awkward and does little justice to the story Morello is trying to tell. And on the guitar-and-voice-only “Midnight in the City of Destruction,” he offers up some of the most embarrassing “la-la-la-ing” I’ve ever heard a singer utter on record.

Fellow rocker/activist Serj Tankien lends his vocals to the moody, floating ambiance of “Lazarus On Down,” and Shooter Jennings appears on the twangy “The Iron Wheel,” which proves to be another forgettable track as Jennings and Morello harmonize on a generic chorus, singing “The iron wheel slowly spins around/ It takes you from the cradle/ ”Til you’re six feet underground”

The album ends with a whimper on the downbeat “Rise to Power,” where Morello whispers “You’ve got to rise to power/ Rise to power/ Rise to power/ Baby, you’ve got to rise to power” over and over. Whether or not you agree with Morello’s so-left-of-center-they-might-crash-into-Taiwan political views, it’s hard to imagine anyone using this song or the album as a rallying point for anything.

This might all sound a bit harsh, but let’s not forget that Rolling Stone dubbed this guy one of the top 100 guitarists of all time back in the ’90s. With those kinds of accolades, you have a certain standard to live up to, and Morello’s songwriting just falls flat in that respect. I don’t doubt his passion, nor his dedication to social and political change, but Morello should have taken notes from former band mate Zach de la Rocha, who delivered his creative and fiery One Day as a Lion EP earlier in the year, picking up emotionally and idealistically where Rage left off.

Dylan and Marley proved to everyone protest music doesn’t need to be loud to inspire, but it does need to properly relay the fervor and passion that boils just below its author’s surface. The Fabled City ends up disappointingly short of that goal.

11/2 stars out of 5