This is sure stirring up some ghosts for me," says Robbie Robertson on the first album he's made since the demise of the Band more than a decade ago – but he's not talking about the ghosts of "The Weight" or "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" or any of the other slices of elemental backwoods rock he wrote while leading that outfit. The Band's music sounded as if it had sprung out of some deep, unsettling North American subconscious; a surprisingly high-tech slice of Eighties rock, Robbie Robertson could have come only from painstaking sessions in a modern-day recording studio. That it still has enormous power is tribute to Robertson's ability to summon up ghosts wherever he is.

Though the man is a certified, class-A legend, the album's success was by no means a sure thing: after they changed the course of rock & roll with Music from Big Pink and The Band in 1968 and '69, Robertson and the Band never again hit those peaks. And after the Last Waltz concert in 1976, Robertson sometimes seemed in danger of becoming one of his own dead-end characters: sleepy eyed, whiskey voiced, purposefully dissolute and romantic as hell, he let his undeniable presence carry him through things like the 1980 movie Carny while keeping his music in the background, except for occasional soundtrack work for his pal Martin Scorsese.

You wanted to believe that the guy still had a great record in him – and you admired him for resisting whatever pressures there were to join his old colleagues in the sadly reunited Band – but when he finally went into the studio to make a solo record and then stayed there for three years, you could only hope that the man who wrote songs as evocative as "King Harvest" and "Chest Fever" still had something left.

It turns out that he did, though it took some unlikely cohorts to bring it out. From the start, Robbie Robertson sounds tough, defiant and assured, but it also sounds like a record made by the guys who back Robertson up. The first song, "Fallen Angel." is a heartbreaking elegy to the late Richard Manuel, the Band's singer-pianist – but even before Peter Gabriel sings the chorus alongside Robertson, the melancholy wash of synthesizers and Manu Katché's stutterstep drumbeats make it sound like something straight off Gabriel's album So. And "Sweet Fire of Love" is even more dramatic: the opening guitar riff could only come from the Edge, and the song itself is a classic exercise in the expansive, hard-rocking side of U2, right down to Bono's wail (which Robertson matches, more or less, in his affecting but gravelly fashion).

They're remarkable songs, both of them, but in a way they sidestep the question of Robertson's own artistic vitality. That's where the rest of the album comes in: not only does Robertson's distinctive sensibility turn a batch of seemingly disparate musical stances into a coherent, focused whole, but you begin to hear how much he brought to U2 and Gabriel, rather than just the other way around.

One thing he brought to them – and to the BoDeans and Maria McKee and Band keyboardist Garth Hudson and everybody else who appears on the album – is an obsessive dedication to myth, to portent-laden images, to dramatic storytelling. This should come as no surprise, considering that his best Band songs were often tales of American lives, big and small; what's new is the scale in which he works. In much of his early work with the Band, Robertson let the small details resonate and underplayed the big metaphors (though that's not true of his signature song, "The Weight"); in later songs, and especially on this album, the storytelling is more elliptical, the images more dramatic and oversize. "Broken Arrow," a love song with an indelibly plaintive air, is nearly all portentous image: "Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow/Who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain?"

It's a bravura, nervy approach that threatens to sink Robertson's aspirations beneath the weight of all the metaphoric Sturm und Drang. Crucially, though, Robertson can supply the kind of forceful, dramatic musical settings that hold their own with the lyrics. "American Roulette" is riveting not because it's the plainest expression of Robertson's obsession with myth making but because its verses (about James Dean, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe) are set to violent, rampaging rock & roll that makes its own points about the brutality of fame. Then there's "Somewhere down the Crazy River": the wondrously raspy Robertson recites the choruses like the hard-boiled private dick in a detective novel, the narrative zigzags as wildly as the river he's singing about, and it's all topped off by a melodic, haunting chorus, with splendidly whiny backing vocals by the BoDeans' Sammy Llanas. What initially sounds silly winds up being extraordinarily affecting.

It's the kind of LP you might expect from a guy whose band once seemed capable of anything but wound up splintering into next to nothing: an album about loss, about longing, about fighting to find a voice and a place. There is nothing on the album as bucolic as "Liv'n in a Dream," as raucous as "Ophelia," as playful as "Up on Cripple Creek"; its characters, from the drafted Indian in "Hell's Half Acre" to the hunted man in "Sonny Got Caught in the Moonlight," together tell a group of stories united only by an unsettling, cautionary poignancy.

Coproduced by Daniel Lanois, who has worked with U2 and Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson sometimes sounds like a harder, sadder Gabriel record. That doesn't mean it'll sell like So – Robertson, who almost never sang in the Band, has an eloquently strained voice that simply isn't very commercial, though its broken nobility is perfect for the sense of yearning that pervades the album's ballads. (Less suited vocally to the fulltilt rockers, he compensates with typically jagged, angular guitar playing that both animates and drives the songs.)

Besides, Robbie Robertson's voice is the only voice for these songs. Uneasy, pained, sometimes angry, it's a voice that unites the disparate strains that make up the album – a voice, you might say, that's full of ghosts. That voice suggests that Robertson, in the words of some of his special guests, still hasn't found what he's looking for; the sound of this album makes it clear that he's hard on the trail. (RS 513)

STEVE POND