Damn, this is a good album.
While Madonna likes to reinvent herself with every release and most of the rest of Bruce Springsteen’s contrarieties are touring with the same handful of songs they had twenty years ago, Springsteen is still making great new music. Ok, maybe great new music is not the right way to say it. It is great music, but it’s also classic Springsteen. Rock and Roll lives as long as Bruce Springsteen lives.
The single song, Radio Nowhere, with it’s moody black and white video, sounds as if it belongs on the soundtrack to Will Smith’s remake of Omega Man about the last man on earth. Is anyone alive out there? This is a great rock song and I think it is my favorite after only a few listens.
Back in high school, I would buy an album, take it home and listen to it all the way through once, maybe twice if it was a Beatles album. Most albums you’d find the two good songs right off the bat and never have to listen to the rest again. Except for The Beatles and The Police, most groups follow this pattern. One or two good songs, and eight to ten fillers. Maybe the bands really tried on the filler tracks, maybe not. If the band is in the hit business, there was usually one good song.
Magic by Bruce Springsteen is a listen all the way through album, more than once, more than twice.
There are two songs that struck me as kind of funny, Your Own Worst Enemy and The Girls in Their Summer Clothes. I like both songs, but the odd thing about them is that Bruce Springsteen is actually singing on them. This is as shocking as playing a Willie Nelson song and hearing him actually sing, it just doesn’t happen. Bruce Springsteen is more of a power rocker with a lot of yelling or talking where the singing part should be. Not a damned thing wrong with that either. But these tracks where he is singing are still a little weird, they sound good, they just don’t really sound like Springsteen.
This is sadder, older Bruce Springsteen, or maybe it is just a sadder, older me listening to Bruce Springsteen. The tracks have a kind of bittersweet quality to them. Dying friends and girls just walking past where they once might have stopped. At least, that is how I hear the songs. Maybe there is just the usual end of summer blues that seem to filter through most of Bruce Springsteen’s songs.
The video for Radio Nowhere has the usual suspects from The E Street Band backing up Bruce Springsteen. There are a lot of saxophone solos for Clarence and several duet moments with the guy in the bandanna and woman with the long hair. There are a few shots of Max on the drums and a few good riffs throughout the album. The music and the vocals are simply amazing.
Bruce was the Rock and Roller of my High School days. I was just on the end of Disco and I really loved New Wave, which finally died with Love Shack by The B52s. Rock and Roll has pretty much had it, unless you count that stuff that Pink and KT Tunstall do as Rock. Even then, there’s not much new rock around.
So hang in their Bruce, your the last of a dying breed.
