If U2 has been this decade's Who, then Bryan Adams has been its Grand Funk. Though that hardly sounds like a compliment, it's not meant as an insult either. Good populist rockers are hard to come by, and for the past few years, Adams – mixing stadium-perfect kids-wanna-rockers with an occasional stab at a message or evocative nostalgia – has been the best of a thin, inconsistent lot.

Unlike Bruce Springsteen, Adams was born to rock the upper decks. While the emotions Springsteen has dealt with may be universal, his settings are not, and as he's widened his canvas, his magic has diminished. With Adams, though, it's the bigger the better. His songs couldn't possibly be more effective in a club than in a hockey arena, and you know that's not true with the Boss.

Even John Cougar Mellencamp relinquished his average-guy credentials with Scarecrow, a praiseworthy achievement that elevated him to the ranks of the special. He may be more popular than ever, but he can no longer get away with simply rocking the house down – he's got to get more special every time out.

Bryan Adams faced the same problem once his hook-laden last album, 1984's Reckless, took him to the top of the arena heap. No longer could he merely be Everyman – writing 1985's "Tears Are Not Enough" (the Canadian "We Are the World") and singing with Tina Turner (who is anything but Everywoman) were enough to blow that cover. So like Mellen-camp and Bob Seger before him, Adams came to the point where he had to move from speaking to the masses to speaking for them. If he didn't, he risked stagnating as a good-time rocker with every Tom, Dick and Bon Jovi poised to supplant him.

So with Into the Fire, his fifth album, Adams follows Mellencamp and Seger up the mountain but fails to come within sight of the peak. Though Into the Fire is Adams's all-around strongest work, it doesn't rival Scarecrow or Seger's Beautiful Loser. Where Seger offered some kind of hope to a lost and rootless generation and Mellencamp pretty well captured the mood of the nation, Adams shows that he has a will to speak but nothing in particular to say.

Ostensibly – and predictably – inspired by Adams's participation in the Live Aid and Amnesty International benefit shows, the themes of the album seem to revolve around various personal and political struggles for freedom. That's hardly a new area to explore, and a scan of the song titles ("Heat of the Night," "Only the Strong Survive," "Into the Fire" and so on) shows that the best Adams and co-writer Jim Vallance could come up with was a series of clichés.

The lyrics rarely rise above such catch-phrase assemblages as these lines from "Only the Strong Survive": "'Cause you gotta understand that there ain't no second chance/No one gets outa here alive – only the strong survive." Worse are the vague pro-Native American message of "Native Son" and the antiwar message of "Remembrance Day," the lyrics of which read like earnest but clumsy high-school poetry. Even Mellencamp's most heavy-handed rhetoric seems graceful by comparison.

On the other hand, Adams has come up with the best-sounding record of his career, actually recording it in his living room. Except for "Heat of the Night," which opens the record on a somewhat plodding note, each track has a winning quality – ranging from the hazy groove of the title song (sort of a cross between the Beatles' "Rain" and the Who's "Baba O'Reilly") to the Stonesish electricity of "Hearts on Fire." With coproducer Bob Clearmountain and a crack band that now includes former Hall and Oates drummer Mickey Curry as a full-time member, Adams keeps his arena sound a step ahead of the pack without resorting to gimmickry. Bombastic? Of course. But it's clear, clean bombast. And if at times Adams's voice sounds like Bonnie Tyler on a bad day, at least it's got some memorable melodies to work with.

What's more, Adams still displays his knack for reaching the rafters with such ready-made fist pumpers as "Rebel" (an earlier version of which was recorded by Roger Daltrey) and "Victim of Love." But relying on crowd pleasers isn't enough for Adams anymore, and Into the Fire makes no case that he can grow beyond that. It's still possible that he has a Scarecrow in him – he's only twenty-seven, after all. But at this point he would appear to be stuck between his rock and a hard place. (RS 500)

STEVE HOCHMAN