Album Reviews : Earle’s Back With New Ease, Naturalness on ‘Alright’ : ***, STEVE EARLE, “I Feel Alright” E-Squared/Warner Bros.

Being Steve Earle hasn’t been easy this decade. The country troubadour disappeared in 1993 into a cloud of hard drugs, jail and rehab. But survival can be a powerful motivator, and it’s made “I Feel Alright” into an urgent declaration of resurrection and a new peak to an already important career.

Earle was always too rough for the Nashville establishment, much as Waylon and Willie and Merle were a generation before. And his new album’s 39 tight minutes of defiance, regret, self-loathing and hope aren’t likely to win him any converts from the achy-breaky crowd as he sings, “Some of you who would live through me would lock me up and throw away the key . . . hope that I go away.”

It’s an edgy, dangerous image that Earle sometimes worked too hard to project on the increasingly rocking albums that followed his 1986 debut, “Guitar Town.” But Earle has relaxed into a new ease and naturalness here, weaving guitar, harmonica and his nasal whine into melodies that are painfully expressive. The rockabilly strut and seething romance of “Poor Boy” is balanced by such tracks as “CCKMP” (“Cocaine Cannot Kill My Pain”), a chilling trip into the depths of heroin addiction. That’s the sound of a soul that’s hit bottom, as raw as the real folk blues, with a voice hardened by bad experience. Don’t try this at home.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).