Billy Joel's late-Seventies records have revealed a songwriter with a fair amount of wit, a tough, unsentimental view of generational and class concerns…. [It] should be obvious that, compared with his commercial competition—the Styxs, REO Speedwagons, and Journeys that glut our airwaves and pretty much define mainstream above-ground rock—the guy comes off as a genius. Or at least an honest, respectable craftsman.

That said, Joel's new … album, "The Nylon Curtain," feels like something of a throwback to his earlier, dismissable work. (The songs that made his initial reputation—Piano Man and the like—seem overheated and faintly embarrassing now.) The admirable Long Island bar-band rocker who had emerged in his recent work is strangely muted here, as is the social diarist, and in their place at times seems to be just another cabaret artist. The songs, when they're not weighted down with shameless and inexplicable references to the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper," are vague and far too personal. They're not annoyingly confessional in the usual manner of the nakedly emotional singer/songwriter; they're simply cryptic. Instead of sketching specific incidents and letting them stand as metaphors for experiences we've all had, they pile on so many specific, seemingly unconnected details that they become unintentionally surreal. Scandanavian Skies, for example, is basically just another band-on-the-road song, but Joel has tricked it up to the point where I defy anybody who wasn't along for the ride to know what the hell he's talking about.

Other songs that might have worked are scuttled by their length. Laura, a potentially interesting portrait of a desperately unhappy girl of a type we have probably all known, goes on longer than War and Peace (well, perhaps it just seems to). And some are simply overambitious. Goodnight Saigon, for example, tries for a large-scale statement about the horror of the Vietnam War but collapses in a confused welter of irony and secondhand period scene-setting that suggests its author OD'd on home viewings of Apocalypse Now.

There are two marvelous exceptions, however. Pressure is a satisfyingly spiteful put-down song in the great tradition (an upwardly mobile Like a Rolling Stone, perhaps) in which the singer sneers at a young woman whose world view seems limited to college psychology courses and Time magazine…. Even better is Allentown…. Joel recounts a story as contemporary as the morning paper, a story of broken promises and fading dreams in America's industrial heartland. It rings utterly true, evoking a genuine mood of contemporary despair without once lapsing into mawkishness or cheapjack cynicism. It's a grand song—and the most overtly rock-and-roll cut on the record, which may not be coincidental.

While "The Nylon Curtain" is not a great album, or even a topflight Billy Joel album, it has to be accounted a partial success for these two songs. Their presence is all the more laudable in an era when the musical mainstream is deliberately bland and the "avant-garde" is recycling devices from fifty-year-old Dada manifestos.