Bruce Springsteen takes listeners to some desolate places on “Devils & Dust” (Columbia): a desert battlefield, a prostitute’s bedroom, the riverbed of the Rio Grande, a barroom gripped by the desperation of last call.

If only it wasn’t such a barren place musically.

Springsteen has made a tradition of alternating amped-up albums with stripped-down affairs, and after the life-affirming rock of “The Rising” and a long tour with the E Street Band, this disc fits that pattern. The E Street Band is gone, except for Springsteen’s wife Patti Scialfa, and the emphasis is on Bruce and his acoustic guitar, with some tasteful adornments.

Using a novelist’s eye for detail and an economy of words, Springsteen always has been able to create vivid settings — be it the south Jersey boardwalk, an amusement park’s thrill ride or, in this case, mostly the rural West. Sometimes these details will make you wince, like on the explicit “Reno” or tragic immigrant’s tale “Matamoros Banks.” These are tales of hard lives, with little redemption offered.

Without a solid musical setting, though, they can simply be academic exercises. “Devils & Dust” suffers from a shortage of strong melodies that will make you want to revisit these people and places. On a song like “Black Cowboy,” Springsteen is talking more than singing.

There are exceptions, to be sure: the lovely and heartbreaking “Matamoros Banks,” the rousing “All the Way Home,” with its pedal steel accents, and “Maria’s Bed,” one of two songs where Springsteen trades in his clipped drawl for a falsetto voice. And artistic stretching of any type beats the alternative.

One quite spectacular advantage of this release is the new “dual disc” format — one side CD, the other DVD. On the DVD, Springsteen offers renditions of five of the new songs, seated with a worn acoustic guitar and harmonica in what could be his house. It’s an extraordinarily intimate look at an artist at work.

Yet “Devils & Dust” ultimately proves that every artist — even a Bruce Springsteen — has a boring album in them.