Maybe it’s unwise to expect Lou Reed to age gracefully, but moderate aging doesn’t seem like too much to ask. Unfortunately, The Raven, Reed’s 20th solo studio album ,disappoints even the most forgiving expectations.

Over the course of an unbearable 75 minutes (there’s a two-hour special edition if you’re up for it), Reed messily amalgamates pieces of Poe’s work with his own tired artistic vision. Unenthused guest stars like David Bowie and Ornette Coleman only add to the imposing heap of tepid and wholly uninteresting gibberish.

The Raven begins with “Overture” and “Edgar Allen Poe,” two interwoven tracks apparently meant to revive the notions of Reed’s gritty rock ‘n’ roll past. But these songs, as well as several others throughout the album, end up only calling attention to the songwriter’s current lack of grit.

The guitar work is generic and limp with the volume and distortion levels kept at irritatingly safe levels. Horrible horn sections dominated by the sort of “smooth” saxophone playing usually reserved for your dentist’s waiting room also show up to form exactly the kind of sound you’d expect from a 60-year-old.

Over this bathwater rock ‘n’ roll is Reed’s voice, quavering in its attempt to sound menacing and emotive. It produces several tracks of the most pretentious adult contemporary music since, well, Paul Simon.

But like any good concept album, The Raven strives to be more than just a group of rock songs. To this end we get sprawling messes like “Call On Me,” in which Laurie Anderson recites poetry with sweeping violins behind her until Reed reappears, ineffectively repeating, “Why didn’t you call on me?”

One of most dire transgressions is the title track, where Willem Dafoe recites Reed’s rewriting of the famous Poe poem for a modern audience. Unfortunately, Reed’s idea of modernizing doesn’t seem to go much further than adding drug and alcohol references — oh yeah, and the word “dickless.” The revised version, complete with phrases like “flames of downtown lore” and “through the haze of cocaine’s glory,” sounds like a middle-schooler’s ad lib and thoroughly pisses on Poe’s grave.

There are many guest artists that lend their varied talents to The Raven, and nearly all of them disappoint in some way. There is the singer known simply as “Antony,” who, apparently with Reed’s permission, commits a brutal rendition of “Perfect Day,” from Reed’s ’72 album Transformer. Over a low-frequency background drone, Antony utilizes a distressing amount of vibrato to turn a brilliant song into pap.

David Bowie puts in his time on “Hop Frog,” where he manages to say “hop frog” 22 times in under two minutes, while Reed’s backing band does a delightfully unexpected Collective Soul impersonation. Gospel legends the Blind Boys of Alabama show up on “I Wanna Know,” only to wail and moan behind Reed’s inferior voice, a vain attempt to lend Reed some soul that he simply does not have.

Among this carnage there are some decent moments. Steve Buscemi’s appearance as a lounge singer in “Broadway Song” isn’t funny, but it is endearing to hear him warble out “Blow, baby, blow,” backed by a brass section.

In “The Bed,” Reed gets close to what this album could have sounded like. An upright bass is bowed in short stabs, creating a sound like heavy breathing, with subdued, plinking guitars on top, while Reed’s voice narrates the thoughts of a husband who moves through his house, recollecting his wife’s suicide. He closes the song with the brilliantly disturbed and detached: “I never would’ve started if I’d known that it’d end this way/but funny thing/I’m not at all sad that it stopped this way.”

On “Vanishing Act,” the singer again keeps the strain on his voice down, opting instead for the subdued menace we know he’s capable of, and rasping out: “How nice it is to disappear/float into a mist.” The hovering voice is supported only by sparse piano until the strings kick in — well timed, for once.

It is in these haunting and less ambitious songs that Reed pulls off the sinister air that the other tracks are simply too ostentatious to elicit — it’s just too bad there aren’t more of them. For the other 90 percent of The Raven, Reed’s pained efforts to make us think we’re all deeply disturbed come off as the scrapings of a rock icon with nothing left to say. nyou