STEVE FORBERT'S ALBUM Jack Rabbit Slim is Bruce Springsteen street music thrown into a Barry Manilow package of syrrupy cliches. Forbert has the formula, the solo instrumentals, the rough voice and the street subjects, but these components lack Springsteen's raw spontaneity and power. Where Springsteen bursts with energy and originality Forbert wallows in the listless and trite.

This album comes as a complete disappointment after Forbert's first effort, Alive on Arrival, an invigorating and unself conscious album that successfully bears comparison to Springsteen and even early Dylan. In songs from Alive like "Going Down to Laurel" and "Settle Down" Forbert is an unharnessed storyteller, combining spirited music and effective ballads.

In Jack Rabbit Slim Forbert focuses his energies on a self-conscious attempt to expand on the style of his first album. This straining results in songs that are unispired, muscially repetitive and lyrically fragmented.

Forbert's songs often contain sensual imaginative passages, but he never extends his melodic inspiration through an entire number. The evocative refrain of "Make it all so real" is made numbing by sheer repetition. And he squelches another glimmer of inspiration, the opening bars of "Romeo's Tune" with similar redundancy. This song, the album's current hit, features a handful of lilting syntheziser phrases evocative of young lover's passion. Forbert can't vary these phrases, however; they recur ad nauseum.

He compounds the pain of the musical monotony with trite lyrics:

Hey Meet me in the Middle of the Day

Let me hear you Say Everything's O.K.

Bring me southern kisses from your room

Hey meet me in the middle of the night

Make me feel all right

Let me smell the moon in your perfume

No passion or urgency carries this song, and no story either. "Romeo's Tune" is representative of other songs on the album, a collection of phrases strung together seemingly out of convenience.

In January 23-30 Forbert skips randomly from the "plain on the old runway," to "drinking beers in the honky tonk," to riding out to a country bridge," then asks "where am I when the preacher speaks?" If the attempt is impressionistic or stream of consciousness, the result is complete confusion. This song also epitomizes forbert's lyrical ineptitude. Forbert doesn't include a sheet of lyrics with his album, and with such profundities as

It's often said life is strange but oh yes

Compared to what?