• Bruce Springsteen, Wrecking Ball – Only when he’s ventured off on limited solo acoustic runs or indulged rare detours (like that jubilant Seeger Sessions outing in 2006) has the Boss opted to leave the E Street Band at home. So it’s hardly unusual he would return with his trusty gang next month to once more headline a couple nights at the L.A. Sports Arena. Even without the Big Man perched on his throne, they undoubtedly will roar as mightily as always, whether the selections are obvious or out of left-field (I always root for another ripping dash through “Candy’s Room”). No doubt they’ll acquit themselves admirably on whatever new songs get tossed into the mix – no matter how little they had a hand in shaping them.
That’s what makes this latest full-blown tour a bit of a head-scratcher: Why has Springsteen chosen standard support when he’s just molded another characteristically rousing album (his 17th) out of rather uncharacteristic methods?
I don’t mean he’s reinvented his studio process, though the welcome sonic overhauling that began with 2009’s underrated Working on a Dream not only remains, it’s been refined. That disc was his most flavorfully over-the-top yet smoothly simmered bouillabaisse since Born in the U.S.A. This one maintains its cinematic grandeur – and yeah, OK, I too detect a whiff of Arcade Fire, especially in the surging lead-off cut “We Take Care of Our Own” and the gently lurching minimalism of “Jack of All Trades,” which builds from loping piano figure to mournful Americana soundscape, then soars on the back of an evocative guitar solo from Tom Morello that’s as traditional as his Nightwatchman records.
But I wonder: Is Bruce really responding to the Canadian indie darlings’ influence or has he simply (and only slightly) revamped the same sort of heightened rock ’n’ roll drama he perfected (hell, half-invented) well before Win Butler was even a zygote?
Either way, that’s hardly the only source he’s pulling from here. The grimy stomp of Tom Waits is practically the disc’s lifeblood; every beat, even the most basic drumming, seems blasted at with fat mallets. Gospel voices cry out whether the Boss is feeling “Shackled and Drawn” or lamenting the “Death of My Hometown,” conveyed with seething bite pitched between the Pogues and Steve Earle.
There’s a bit of atypical over-reaching for a cathartic conclusion via the final three songs: Peter Gabriel wouldn’t have made “Rocky Ground” quite so ponderous, but he also would have kept the world-beat shadings; the recent live staple “Land of Hope and Dreams,” though finally committed to record in a memorable version, has nonetheless lost some impact from so much familiarity; and “We Are Alive,” albeit well-intended, tries too hard to convey significance. All the same, none of them sound like Arcade Fire.
As for the hard-bitten lyrics – virtually all of them tempered with patriotic optimism that never feels corny, just true – well, they routinely reiterate just how deeply entrenched Woody Guthrie’s plainspoken everyman aesthetic has become in Springsteen’s soul. The old master’s spirit has reinvigorated his psychic progeny with fervency not seen since The Ghost of Tom Joad: His writing has rarely been so sparse and direct, the motives and actions of his modernized Dust Bowl characters often contoured only by a telling line or two.
The way I hear it, Wrecking Ball is the inevitable, not-quite-flawless amalgam in Springsteen’s later catalog. It smashes through the guts of its predecessors, dragging shards forward in a rush of tricked-up Americana: the bleak empathy of Tom Joad (1995), the compassion of The Rising (2002), the reignition of Magic (2007), the rustic realism of Devils & Dust (2005), the hootenanny looseness of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006) and that project’s polar opposite, the expansive but precisely conjured delight of Dream.
Finely pureed together, the result, not unlike Arcade Fire at its most fiercely joyful, is outwardly ebullient yet still vividly stark. “I’m trudging through the dark in a world gone wrong,” he sings at one point, like a yelping field hand. “The road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone,” he insists at the album’s outset, yet with quiet defiance he also declares “We Are Alive” for the finale.
Right, he’s written better batches of songs in the past decade. The deceptively happy holler of “Easy Money,” gruff impressionism about desperate people doing what they must to make a buck, doesn’t surpass Springsteen’s similarly themed Nebraska paradigms just because it grafts on fiddle and na-na-na-ing female voices, and it’s unfortunate that a couplet creator as savvy as the Boss, even in a back-to-basics approach to words, would still feel compelled to add a horn-tinged swamp-rocker titled “You’ve Got It” to the lexicon. Don’t we have enough of that sort of thing? Doesn’t Bruce?
And yet I think his lack of clever phrases is deliberate. For a good long stretch of pretty stellar music this millennium, from The Rising to Dream, Springsteen has allowed his middle-age imagination to flower with little restraint. (Listen again to the love-it-or-loathe-it epic “Outlaw Pete”: He hadn’t had such operatic fun in decades.) But this is an election year, a time when he tends to have more salient, forcefully expressed messages on his mind, not existential queries or concerns for the nuances of romantic working-class love. Deep economic recession tends to do that to America’s folk heroes.
Yet Wrecking Ball is largely inspired and, even in its most predictable moments, a highly inspiring assortment. If it won’t give rise to a dozen meaningful new bands, it’s nonetheless powerful enough to leave a lasting impression, one I bet becomes indelible once the E Street Band gets their hands on this stuff live.
All the same, this isn’t an E Street record the way Magic or The Rising were (both deserved their name on the sleeve). For starters, Rage Against the Machine’s Morello performs on as many tracks (two) as mighty Max Weinberg; Springsteen himself plays more drums this time out, in addition to banjo, piano and organ. The names Garry Tallent, Roy Bittan, Nils Lofgren and Steven Van Zandt are not among the lengthy list of musician credits; remnants of sax work from Clarence Clemons appear only twice, though we know why that is.
And still this is another worthy, even courageous installment in a remarkable career, one filled with timeless sentiments that will surely resonate just as loudly should we find ourselves in a financial pickle all over again in 2020 or 2036. Yet this new set strides so valiantly away from the Boss playbook, I almost wish Springsteen had dared to produce a more fan-challenging tour behind it, bolstered by a different kind of group, perhaps even an augmented E Street Band. Any ensemble, really, that wouldn’t automatically splatter its imperturbable dynamic across material that might otherwise benefit from an array of new moods, tones, instrumentation.
The Boss gets unquestionably excellent backing from his faithful musical family, but he doesn’t always need them – a reality made all the more palpable with the loss of Clemons and, three years earlier, keysman Danny Federici. Unlike when Springsteen pushed them aside at the dawn of the ’90s and wound up fumbling through not one but two albums (Lucky Town and Human Touch, simultaneously released in March 1992), the iconic rocker now has clearer command of his muse post-superstardom, not to mention a deepened understanding of how past forms can become fresh all over again.
I suspect I’ll love most every minute of Springsteen’s Sports Arena stand. But along with the album, I hope to see in those shows some kind of growth peeking out of the wreckage of the recent past. Otherwise, he’s wasting his time, if not our money. Wrecking Ball’s finest moments prove it: Sometimes sidestepping the obvious is just what’s needed to rejuvenate the Boss’ mojo. Grade: A-
Photo by Danny Clinch.
More album reviews:
.
Album review: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ is a post from: Soundcheck