* 1/2 LOU REED, “Ecstasy,” Reprise

Reed is not just cursed with being a living rock legend, making it inevitable that he release records long after his cultural impact has been absorbed, propagated and diluted. As demonstrated by his latest album (in stores Tuesday), the unpredictable artiste also cannot make ordinary life as strangely compelling as the dire worlds of addiction and sex he navigated early on.

Where his Velvet Underground classic “Heroin” was bleak in the extreme, the 14 tracks on “Ecstasy” are simply bleak. There’s nary a trace of the offbeat hooks that make Reed’s best songs irresistible, only 77 minutes of gritty, virtually unchanging drone behind portraits of characters caught between right and wrong, past and future, reality and fantasy.

Such numbers as “Mad,” which details a man’s confused self-hate when his adultery is discovered, faintly recall Reed’s creepy ability to put us inside the head of someone we’d rather not know. Yet the bombastic, 18-minute addict’s journey “Like a Possum” is pure tedium. A stab at social commentary, “Future Farmers of America” envisions slavery with whites as victims and blacks as oppressors, but it too falls flat.

*

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