Record Reviews - RecordDB

Artist	Title	Review
Bruce Springsteen	Working On A Dream	<p>From its bright, brittle production to its tossed-off postage stamp cover art, Working on a Dream is in every respect a companion piece to Magic, an album that's merely a set of songs, both sprawling and deliberately small, songs that don't necessarily tackle any one major theme but all add up to a portrait of their time. Magic chronicled the dog days of Bush where Working on a Dream is designed as a keynote to the Obama age, released just a week after the inauguration of the U.S.'s 44th president and not coincidentally containing not a little optimism within its 13 tracks. This sense of hope is a tonic to the despair that crept into the margins of Magic but it's easy to posit Working on a Dream as pure positivity, which isn't exactly true: a hangover from W lingers, most vividly in the broken spirit of "The Wrestler," and Bruce mourning departed E Street Band member Danny Federici with "The Last Carnival." Springsteen peppers his tribute with assets/images recalling the early days of the E Street Band but saves a revival of their wild, woolly sound for the opening "Outlaw Pete," a cavernous, circular, comical epic reminiscent of Springsteen's unwieldy portraits of rats on the Jersey Shore. "Outlaw Pete" is Working on a Dream at its best, playing like nothing less than The E Street Shuffle as reflected and refracted through Arcade Fire's naked hero worship, casually highlighting how producer Brendan O'Brien has gently nudged the Boss toward new musical avenues.</p><p>Many of these new sounds are drawn from the past, often feeling informed by Little Steven's Underground Garage -- Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren's guitars chime like the Byrds; the band knocks out a tough little blues number on "Good Eye"; and Springsteen shows a knack for pure pop on "Surprise, Surprise" and indulges his ever-increasing Brian Wilson fascination on "This Life," whose percolating organs and harmonies rival the High Llamas. All this rests nicely alongside the Boss' trademarks -- galloping rockers that fill a stadium ("My Lucky Day") and their polar opposite, his intimate acoustic tunes ("Tomorrow Never Knows") -- which all make Working on a Dream read like a rich, inventive, musical album...which it is, to an extent. The ideas and intent are there, but the album is hampered slightly by the overall modesty of Springsteen's writing -- by and large, these are small-scale songs and feel that way -- and hurt significantly by the precise, digital production that muffles the music's imagination and impact. A large part of Springsteen's appeal has always been how the E Street Band has sounded as big and open as his heart, but Working on a Dream, like Magic before it, has a production that feels tiny and constrained even as it is layered with extraneous details. It's possible to listen around this production and hear the modest charms of the songs, but the album would be better if the sound matched the sentiment.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><p>Working on a Streak is more like it. First, there's that Golden Globe for "The Wrestler", then a performance at the We Are One concert at the Lincoln Memorial, a handful of Grammy noms for a two-year-old song, a greatest-hits package exclusive from Wal-Mart, this weekend's Super Bowl halftime show, and a just-announced reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town. So that Oscar snub can't sting too much. In the middle of a pretty amazing month, Bruce Springsteen is releasing his 16th studio album, one whose title sounds more like a campaign slogan than a rock record. Maybe that's intentional: After spending much of this decade playing up to listeners' notions of post-9/11 recovery and conjuring up bleak visions of Bush-era America, the Boss settles into some sense of contentment on Working on a Dream, as if that Dream had already been achieved. In this regard, the album sounds like the final installment of a trilogy he began with The Rising in 2002 and continued with Magic in 2007—ignoring Devils & Dust, which isn't hard to do, and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, which remains his best and most freewheelin' late-career album.</p><p>Tracing his personal—and, arguably, our national—mood from wounded to outraged to somewhat contented, these albums are linked by Springsteen's ongoing collaboration with producer Brendan O'Brien, whose work has grown increasingly capable and adventurous with each release. Despite removing any trace of regional shuffle from these songs, O'Brien puts them across like the proficient bar band they are, roaring through "My Lucky Day" and "What Love Can Do" with professional abandon. O'Brien erects an impressive 1960s wall of sound on "Surprise, Surprise", with its carnivalesque organ and girl-group backing vocals, and in general he streamlines the E Street Band's sound to highlight one central melody or riff. Opener "Outlaw Pete" rides an ascending/descending theme not dissimilar to KISS' "I Was Made for Loving You". Strings protrude from the song at odd angles, Springsteen's vocals echo through what sounds like a deep valley, and Roy Bittan contributes a hyperactive organ as the song spins a yarn about an outlaw so vague he sounds only theoretical. The track is overstuffed with ideas, and at eight minutes, it's a strange, ineffective opener, setting a curiously detached mood for an album that is, for Springsteen, typically engaged.</p><p>Of his three E Street Band releases of the 00's, Working on a Dream is the one that most sounds like a solo album, indulging a range of ideas that reveal Springsteen as still musically curious and more than willing to play around with his sound. Another American rock saint—Brian Wilson—shows up in the walking bass line on the title track as well as in the Pet Sounds percussion and ba-ba-ba's of "This Life". The scribbly guitar on "Life Itself" recalls the Byrds on "Eight Miles High" more than Nils Lofgren or Steve Van Zandt, providing a tense backdrop for Springsteen's pleading lyrics. The garbled-blues "Good Eye", one of the album's weirdest tracks, ratchets Springsteen's distorted vocals to a yelping beat and electrified banjo, but like his recent one-off download "A Night With the Jersey Devil", it feels like merely a demonstration of studio technique.</p><p>Working on a Dream works hard on sound, but sleeps on actual songs. "Queen of the Supermarket" may be the worst thing he's ever written, an overly symphonic ballad about crushing on the stock girl. It's sweet, but there's something about the high-flying strings and the intensity of the imagery ("A dream awaits in aisle number two") that suggests parody. The checkout beeps that help the song out to its car certainly don't dispel the wink. "At night I take my groceries and drift away," Springsteen sings, but here his working-class identifications sound a little condescending and inappropriate. Just as "57 Channels (And Nothing On)" failed to convince anyone that Springsteen watched a lot of TV, "Queen of the Supermarket" can't persuade listeners that he does his own grocery shopping. Now that his big dream has come true, Springsteen doesn't seem to know what to do with himself. So he's trying to do everything.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen	London Calling - Live In Hyde Park	<p>Captured in London at the Hard Rock Calling Festival on June 28, 2009 in HD, the 163-minute film documents 26 tracks of live Springsteen that begin in daylight and progress through a gorgeous sunset into night. Viewers are able to see Springsteen spontaneously directing the E Street Band and shaping the show as it evolves. The set list spans from 'Born To Run' era to 'Working On a Dream' and includes rare covers such as The Clash's "London Calling," Jimmy Cliff's "Trapped," The Young Rascals' "Good Lovin'," and Eddie Floyd's "Raise Your Hand." Springsteen also performs fan favorite "Hard Times (Come Again No More)," written by Stephen Foster in 1854. Brian Fallon from The Gaslight Anthem joins the band as a guest vocalist on Springsteen's own "No Surrender." GRAMMY and Emmy Award-winning producer and editor Thom Zimny and director Chris Hilson, both members of Springsteen's video team dating back over a decade, oversaw the film. Audio was mixed by Bob Clearmountain. Bonus material includes stunning footage of "The River" from Glastonbury, June 27; and the full music video for "Wrecking Ball," filmed at New Jersey's Giants Stadium.</p><p>— <strong>Amazon</strong></p><hr /><p>Highly anticipated by fans of The Boss, and those who track high-profile concert DVDs generally, the new release from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is a hot and sweaty rock 'n' roll spectacle, just in time for summer in the city.<p>London Calling Live In Hyde Park documents the band's showcase last summer in London's central public green space - the equivalent of New York City's Central Park. Even by big event standards, this is an oversized gig — the London crowd stretches on for what seems like miles, and Bruce and the band are clearly in outdoor festival mode.</p><p>Mr. Springsteen is legendary, of course, for outsized concert events, and his stamina as a performer is ridiculous. Three-hour concerts are the norm for the E Street crew, and they don't disappoint here - the 2-DVD set clocks in at just under 180 minutes, counting the included pair of extra tracks ("The River" from the previous night's warm-up gig, and the music video for "Wrecking Ball.")</p><p>In fact, the show outlasts the sun, beginning in broad daylight and proceeding through a gorgeous sunset at Hyde Park. As the last numbers wind down in the blue glow of London twilight, it becomes clear that this is a genius move on the part of the producers. Mother Nature provides a better light show that any team of technicians could have wired.</p><p>Springsteen kicks off the show with a relatively faithful cover of the Clash's immortal call-to-arms "London Calling." Pulling at the song's insistent, staccato chords, Springsteen gives early notice that he's not horsing around. It's an odd sight to see Springsteen signing those famous lines about nuclear errors and London drowning, but it works. If he can't quite match the snarling intensity of Joe Strummer's original vocals — well, he very nearly does, and that counts for something.</p><p>The set list from here bounces all around, with numbers going back to the Born to Run era all the way up through the latest album, Working on a Dream. Besides the opening Clash number, Bruce peppers in a few more covers, including "Good Lovin'," Jimmy Cliff's "Trapped," and the traditional ballad "Hard Times (Come Again No More)."</p><p>Highlights abound. On "Youngstown," Bruce evokes his trademark vibe of sepia-toned Americana, and it makes you think: It's kind of nice to have these guys in Europe, doing their thing. On balance, it's fair to say that Springsteen is one of our very best cultural ambassadors of the last several decades. Later in the show, when he digs into the nostalgic "Glory Days," the feeling comes again: This is the image of America we would like to be exporting, instead of wars and oil spills and whatever bobblehead tweenage pop stars Hollywood is pushing this season.</p><p>In his jeans and work shirt (with the sleeves rolled up, of course), Springsteen sells the common-man thing like no one else. He may also be the only blue-collar guy that can wear a soul patch convincingly. Cynics sometimes point to his overall image as shtick , but I'm not buying.</p><p>When Springsteen dons a cowboy hat for "Outlaw Pete," and kneels down to relate to the crowd in a raspy voice, you remember what a surpassing storyteller and flat-out showman he is. Nice, too, that in quieter moments like these, the terrific audio brings out every nuance of the accompanying musicians (in this case, Soozie Tyrell on violin). Audio overall is superlative, and is presented in Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound or PCM Stereo.</p><p>The stage setup is designed to accommodate such moments, projecting to the back seats while still providing some intimacy. The high platform main stage connects via a set of steps to a catwalk skirting the front rows. At one point, Springsteen comes down to the catwalk and gathers all the signs of song requests from the crowd.</p><p>Springsteen talks about this evolving tradition at his shows in an interview on the promotional trailer for the DVD.</p><p>"Somewhere along the line, the fans got the idea that if they brought their signs, they were going to have a higher lobbying potential to hear their songs of choice," he says. "For us, it becomes like "Stump the Band." It tests the E Street archives a little, you know."</p><p>Sure enough, about halfway through the set Springsteen gathers the stack of requests and puts them on stage. As the show progresses, he grabs a song title off the stack — "Bobby Jean" — and cues the band by literally waving the sign at them. It adds a nice sense of spontaneity to the proceedings.</p><p>Other of Springsteen's dusty rock moves are less engaging. I understand some stage antics are so traditional there's no point in fighting them, but I feel like I've been watching Springsteen and sidekick Stevie Van Zandt share a microphone for most of my adult life. Can't we all pitch in and get Stevie his own mic?</p><p>All the other E Street regulars are on hand as well, including Nils Lofgren on guitar and Max Weinberg on drums. And of course few sounds in creation are as instantly recognizable as Clarence Clemons' saxophone.</p><p>And now, a word about sweat. According to accounts from attendees, it was a particularly warm summer evening when they filmed this show in London. Springsteen has huge circles under his arms by the middle of the second song, "Badlands." By the time he's in "Youngstown," halfway though the first set, he's thoroughly drenched and literally flinging perspiration with every strum. It's amazing, really. Dude is 60 years old!</p><p>Bruce isn't afraid to make the occasional joke at the expense of his veteran status, either. At one point, he pretends to collapse coming up those steps. And check out his farewell shout-out to the crowd. Which of these items is not like the others?</p><p>"London! You've just seen the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, earth-shocking, booty-shaking, love-making, Viagra-taking, history-making, legendary E Street Band!"</p><p>No two ways about it; Springsteen knows how to work a crowd. In what may be the show's most powerful moment, he goes into preacher man mode, pacing the stage as he promises to build — for a couple hours at least, here in Hyde Park —"a house of hope and joy in a world of fear and despair." As the band vamps behind him, Revered Bruce delivers the good word: "We're going to bring down the power of music on ya!"</p><p>It's heartening somehow to hear the power of rock so earnestly invoked, seeing as we're near 50 years past from the high tide of the 1960s. Since that moment when, as Hunter Thompson so devastatingly put it, "the wave finally broke and rolled back."</p><p>Well, take heart, brethren. The Boss, at least, is still doing what he can.</p><p>— <strong>Glenn McDonald</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen	Darkness On The Edge Of Town [Remaster]	<p>The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story is a three-CD/three-DVD deluxe collection that includes a completely remastered version of the Darkness album and two more discs entitled The Promise, containing 21 unreleased songs recorded during the period.</p><p>The remastered version of the album by Bob Ludwig is sonically righteous; it resists the temptation of the era's technology to make everything sound flat. Its dynamics and warmth mirror those on the original vinyl edition. The two discs of unreleased material (available separately as well) offer an aural view as to what might have happened had Springsteen been able to record immediately after Born to Run. (He was barred from doing so for two years due to a lawsuit with his former manager.) While many lyric themes here reflect the brokenness and hard choices found on Darkness, others sound more triumphant. All of these songs contain a more maximal attitude in production. They also lack the knife-edge, searing, angry guitar work that saturates Darkness. Included are his versions of singles farmed out to other artists -- "Because the Night" (and while this version is terrific, it means something else in the end; Patti Smith's remains definitive) and the soulful, gritty "Fire" given to the Pointer Sisters. "Gotta Get That Feeling" summons Jack Nitzsche's production ears with its big mariachi brass. Many others openly recall Phil Spector's "sha-na-na-na" backing choruses. Clarence Clemons' saxophone is much more prevalent here than on Darkness. His meaty tone adds heft and groove to these songs. "Ain't Good Enough for You" is pure handclap, call-and-response, verse-and-chorus joy, approaching a doo wop celebration. The poignant love poetry in "The Brokenhearted" and "Spanish Eyes" could have been written by Doc Pomus, and reveals the influence of Jerry Lieber's "Spanish Harlem." "Candy's Boy" begins lyrically in the same place as "Candy's Room," but becomes a very different song. "Racing in the Street" contains some different words and David Lindley's violin makes the track a bit less personal, more anthemic; it's absent the shadow of doubt that makes the Darkness version so emotionally devastating. "The Promise" is the only cut that may have added something to Darkness that isn't already there. Its sense of bewilderment, betrayal, uncertainty, and regret is total. That said, the addition of strings draws it outside Darkness' more skeletal purview, underscoring that Darkness is perfect as it is.</p><p>The first of the three DVDs features a full-length documentary directed by Thom Zimny on the making of the album, with fantastic, amazing archival studio and performance video footage by Barry Rebo. The narration by Springsteen and interviews with producer Jon Landau, bandmembers, Patti Smith, engineer Jimmy Iovine, and even Mike Appel provide an intimate look at an intense and often frustrating period in the career of Springsteen & the E Street Band. The viewer can feel the places where confusion reigned given the sheer amount of material -- over 70 songs were written and demoed; piles of notebooks from which song lyrics and ideas were cobbled are perched everywhere. The fact that a single album came from this mountain is amazing in itself; that Darkness on the Edge of Town emerged is a miracle. The second DVD here contains a complete 2009 performance of the album at the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, NJ on the first half. While the performance is flawless and stirring, the lack of interaction with an audience feels a bit strange. That said, hearing Springsteen play the hell out of his guitar again, making it scream and snarl as it did during the tour for Darkness, is not only welcome, but akin to the sound of an old friend's voice after a prolonged absence. Bob Clearmountain's mix is stellar. The band's instinctive playing is tight and intuitive. The rest of the disc features footage from the Thrill Hill Vault, including rehearsal footage, recording snippets, and some concert performances from New Jersey, New York, and Phoenix from the tour. The final DVD is a complete three-hour concert by Springsteen & the E Street Band from Houston in 1978. It's called a “bootleg cut” on the cover for a reason; the video is fine, but the audio is basically board sound and a bit thin. That said, the performance is dynamic and riveting, and only audiophiles are gonna care -- it rocks top to bottom. This box set also includes an 80-page spiral-bound reproduction of Springsteen's notebooks documenting the album sessions, plus an original, insightful essay. It's the ultimate fetish item for hardcore fans and rock historians.</p><p>— <strong>Thom Jurek</strong></p><hr/><p>Sometimes reissues add a few demos or outtakes, sometimes they add a bonus disc with a live show or additional music, and sometimes they go so far with the bonus material they become something else entirely. The Promise, a name given to two sets based around unheard music from Bruce Springsteen dating to 1977 and 1978, when he was writing and recording the seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town, doesn't fit easily into typical reissue categories. There's a 2xCD, 3xLP set that contains 22 unreleased songs from the period, and then there's a deluxe box set that augments the unreleased material with a remastered version of Darkness and three DVDs. And the latter is housed in a faux spiral-bound notebook with facsimiles of Springsteen's handwritten studio notes from the time. Taken all together, we're talking 10 hours plus of video and audio, along with the booklet. So calling this a reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town is not accurate. This is a trove, a vast clearinghouse from a fertile period, the product of which turned out to be one terrific album. And in addition to containing its share of treasure, The Promise ultimately confirms that Springsteen is a brilliant editor of his own material.</p><p>That much is clear when listening to the album itself, which is in danger of being overshadowed by everything released around it. Where the Born to Run box from 2005 looked intently at the album proper (there were few outtakes from those sessions anyway) and portrayed what resulted as a landmark, The Promise focuses on a period of time that produced one memorable album but could have produced others. Much of the material was written when Springsteen was embroiled in a lawsuit with his former manager, and a lot has been made of the impact the legal proceedings were said to have on Springsteen's muse. He made a bleak and bombed-out album, the story goes, because he was feeling lost in the world himself, fearful that he was losing control of his career. And since the lawsuit kept him out of the studio when he wanted so badly to record, he kept piling up songs while he waited for the smoke to clear.</p><p>Even more than the lawsuit, Darkness seems like Springsteen's instinctive recoil from the Born to Run hype. That's partly why he burned to cut another record—to "find out what he's got," to quote a line from "Badlands" that particularly appealed to him. The Promise documentary included with the box, which combines black-and-white video footage taken in the studio while the album was recorded with recent interviews, makes clear that he wanted to make an "honest" record that people would take seriously. He was embarrassed by the hype that had put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously in 1975, and he didn't want to be the "next big thing."</p><p>Indeed, it's striking just how different Darkness is from its predecessor in tone and theme. Where Born to Run was about drama, with a sense of bombast that pushed past cinematic and wound up somewhere closer to Broadway, Darkness, despite its share of rockers, is about grim acceptance and pressing on in the face of doubt. In "Racing in the Street", the bittersweet ballad that ranks with the best songs Springsteen has ever written, the narrator's girlfriend "Stares off alone into the night/ With the eyes of one who hates for just being born." But she's not going anywhere. The darkness that envelops the town keeps the characters in and the rest of the world out. Where the characters in Born to Run were racing against death, the characters here are cursed with the burden of survival. So like all Springsteen records in the early part of his career, there are many songs about cars and driving, but these people seem to be going in circles, idly moving from one place to the next. "You can ride this road 'til dawn, without another human being in sight," goes a line in the richly emotional mid-tempo rocker "Something in the Night". With no chance of escape, you have to figure out how to deal with what's in front of you.</p><p>The stark reality of the songs is reinforced by the album's production. Darkness is in its own way as sonically consistent and coherent as Born to Run; but where that album drew inspiration from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Darkness tries to do as much as possible with a minimum of embellishment. A few tracks break from this dry and barren template. "Candy's Room" and "Something in the Night" have the tinkling piano and glockenspiel that might have helped them to fit on Born to Run, while "Racing in the Street" has a very particular and hugely effective atmosphere, with just the right touches of reverb and backing vocals to make it sound like an elegy. As for the remastering, I'm not hearing a lot of difference here, but Darkness always sounded good. From the opening drum fill of "Badlands" to the grim fade of the title track, there's not a weak song on the album and it deservedly ranks with Springsteen's classics. Which means that it ranks with rock's classic albums, full stop.</p><p>And it took a long time to get it that way. The music on the 2xCD set The Promise, which was written during the Darkness sessions, shows what Springsteen had to leave behind to get the record that he wanted. That meant no big pop songs. There's "Because the Night", given to Patti Smith before being completed, which she then improved and turned into her biggest hit. And then "Fire", which Springsteen gave to the Pointer Sisters, and which went to No. 2 on Billboard. It also means no songs about easy times, hope, and escape. So "Gotta Get That Feeling", an appealing mid-tempo track with horns and sweet backing vocals and lines like "We ain't got no money but we don't care" was shelved. (In Darkness, people have no money but they do care, a lot.) And "Save My Love", a catchy piano-led tune, isn't going to make Darkness with lines like "If we open up our hearts/ Love won't forsake us." Tell that to the couple in "Racing in the Street".</p><p>The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs for material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best. The set kicks off with "Racing in the Street ('78)", a version that begins as an austere ballad but builds into a rock song. It's nowhere near as effective as what came to be on the record, but it is riveting, showing just how elastic Springsteen's melodic and thematic ideas could be. An early version of "Candy's Room" is here, too, and it's called "Candy's Boy"; instead of the original's dark and explosive sensuality, here it's a clean, shuffling guitar-pop tune, charming but without a lot at stake.</p><p>The tracks on The Promise CD aren't left out just because of subject matter or tone—they also sound different. As with some songs on Tracks, some of these songs had parts added later. "Where needed, I worked on them to bring them to fruition," Springsteen writes in the notes. "Many stand as they were recorded all those years ago." The re-touching is at its most extreme on "Save My Love", which was written in the 70s but cut in 2010. In other places, the vocals and music sound fundamentally different from the recordings of the era. Certainly, the arrangements are thicker than what wound up on Darkness, which makes sense since some of the songs left behind were R&B-based bar-band songs and swooning songs of love and lust. Still, despite the lack of consistency, the 22 new songs (there are 21 tracks, but "The Way" is a hidden bonus track at the end) are mostly very good and occasionally great. None feel like they should have been on Darkness, but almost all of them hold up to repeat plays and stand on their own as very good Springsteen—easily on the level of mid-level stuff on The River, say.</p><p>On the visual side, one DVD has a bizarre recording of Springsteen and the E Street Band playing Darkness on the Edge of Town straight through in an empty theater in Asbury Park in December 2009. I suspect that this decision was inspired in part by the notion that the album is about loneliness and open spaces, but there's something off about seeing this band, known so well for its deep connection to its audience, playing by themselves in a large room without people.</p><p>More interesting on the same disc are the live odds-and-ends from rehearsals at Springsteen's rented Jersey home in the 70s. The band is packed into what looks like a small bedroom, Springsteen is shirtless, with the familiar guitar around his neck, standing before a microphone taped to a stand. And the band is running through a couple new songs in an intimate space with no sense at all of posterity. (They are so casual, Steve Van Zant isn't even wearing a hat!) Also on this disc are songs from a 1978 show in Phoenix, including the famous clip for "Rosalita" that got some play in the early days of MTV. These Phoenix performances are generally superior to the three-hour set from a 1978 show in Houston included on a separate DVD. The video comes from the arena's video feed and, given the quality of video in 1978, quality could be better. But it is a multi-camera shoot with good coverage and Springsteen and the E Street band were in amazing form throughout that year. So no complaints about more live Springsteen.</p><p>Which leaves the documentary, which in one sense serves as the centerpiece of the project. As with the film included with the Born to Run box, there are interesting details about the technical aspects of the album. Chuck Plotkin's theory behind his approach to mixing vocals is fascinating, and explains why this album feels so balanced. We see fragments of songs, lots of exhaustion and sitting around, and get a look at how Springsteen works as a bandleader. There's a moment in the first scene where he looks tired and frustrated and a little pissed off and you realize that it would be scary to have him mad at you. He's not always an easy guy to work for. It's refreshing to see such a simple display of humanity when the documentary obviously has very specific points that it wants to hit.</p><p>Still, there's something odd about these "making of" documentaries about albums coming from the artist themselves. In part because they seem so intent on directing how the music is heard. Sets like this and Neil Young's Archives reflect a desire for artists to take control of their legacy and shape the narrative of their careers. It's easy to understand this impulse, and doubly so when you are talking about people as controlling as Springsteen or Neil Young. And yet it's also futile. As listeners, our stories are what will ultimately matter, and by having the music in our lives, we give it significance and form. Darkness is the kind of record you sink into, an album of power and dignity and loss and just a hint at the possibility of transcendence, which is something Springsteen's fans have known all along, even without hearing a single detail of how it is made. We'll take it all and have loads of fun exploring all the ephemera, but Springsteen carved through all this—the pile of songs, the legal bullshit, the media image he wasn't comfortable with—to make that one magical record, which is the most impressive part of it all.</p><p>— <strong>Mark Richardson, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen	High Hopes	<p>There isn't another Bruce Springsteen album like High Hopes. Cobbled together from covers -- of other songwriters along with the Boss himself ("American Skin [41 Shots]" and "The Ghost of Tom Joad" are both revived) -- and outtakes from the last decade, High Hopes doesn't have the cohesion or gilded surfaces of Wrecking Ball, but neither is it quite a clearinghouse of leftovers. Inspired in part by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who has proven to be a brother in arms to Springsteen, as well as a substitute for Steven Van Zandt in the E-Street Band, High Hopes certainly bears the proud stamp of Morello, both in its workingman's politics and in its cinematic sound. Much of this record oscillates between the moody and militant, particularly in the politically charged numbers, which are often colored by percussive guitar squalls. Here, the RATM guitarist often resembles a Nils Lofgren stripped of blues or lyricism -- think of the gusts of noise on "Tunnel of Love" without any melodicism -- and that's a bracing change for Springsteen, who has shown interest in atmospherics but usually when they're coming from keyboards, not six strings. Such sociological talk suggests High Hopes is nothing but rallying cries and downhearted laments, but the fascinating thing about this unkempt collection is how these protest songs and workingman's anthems are surrounded by intimate tunes, ranging from a cover of the Saints' latter-day "Just Like Fire Would" to a strangely soothing interpretation of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream." Morello reportedly had as much to do with the inclusion of these covers as he did with the record's set pieces -- a stirring "The Ghost of Tom Joad," "American Skin" (which can't help but seem like a reference to the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin in this context), and "High Hopes," a Tim Scott McConnell song first recorded in the '90s -- and there's a certain sober passion that ties all these songs together but, in turn, it makes the rest of the record all the more compelling because the pieces simply don't fit. There's the rousing Gaelic rock of "This Is Your Sword," sounding a bit like a rejected closing credit theme for The Wire; "Down in the Hole," which rides the same train-track rhythm as "I'm on Fire;" the complicated waltz of "Hunter of Invisible Game," softer and stranger than much of the rest here; "Harry's Place," a bit of synthesized Sopranos noir that sounds much older than its ten years; and the absolutely glorious "Frankie Fell in Love," as open-hearted and romantic a song as Springsteen has ever written. Strictly speaking, these 12 songs don't cohere into a mood or narrative but after two decades of deliberate, purposeful albums, it's rather thrilling to hear Springsteen revel in a mess of contradictions.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><p>Back in 2000, Bruce Springsteen debuted a new song called "American Skin (41 Shots)" at a concert in Atlanta. It was, he claimed, inspired by the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was shot 19 times when four New York City police officers mistook his wallet for a gun. The song was a deeply empathetic response to the tragedy, as a famous rock star tried to see the world from the point of view of both the police officers who work rough neighborhoods and the African American residents who find themselves in danger for even the most harmless actions. Even before many people had actually heard it, "American Skin" sparked controversy, as New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Chief Howard Safir publically condemned both the singer and the song. Particularly egregious was the reaction of Bob Lucente, the head of the State Fraternal Order of Police, who called Springsteen both a "dirtbag" and a "floating fag."</p><p>For his part, Springsteen weathered the uproar stoically. He explained in interviews that the song wasn't necessarily anti-cop, but he didn't shy away from making it a permanent addition to his setlists during that tour. A studio version was released to radio stations, but the song wasn't available commercially until the following year, when it appeared at the beginning of disc two of 2001's Live in New York City. In the decade since, it has collected dust as a footnote in Springsteen's late-career catalog—a reminder, when you needed one, that he could still write a powerful and topical song. In 2009, however, he revived "American Skin" and began dedicating performances to Trayvon Martin, and that sad new relevance is ostensibly the reason the song appears on Springsteen's 18th album, High Hopes, a collection of new recordings of songs that he has been playing for 10 or 12 years. Essentially these are all outtakes from The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream**, but Springsteen re-recorded them with producer Ron Aniello and sequenced them into a standalone album.</p><p>The Boss has a famously deep archive of quality songs from throughout his career, so there's no reason to scoff at the concept behind High Hopes. Fans have been bootlegging these songs for years now, which means the album is aptly titled: There are high hopes for studio versions of almost all of these songs, especially "American Skin". The new version, though, has stiff competition. The performance on Live in New York City gains its power from the concert setting, with the E Street Band alternating vocals to create a sense of community and Clarence Clemons' sax solo sounding like a heartfelt eulogy. The studio version from 2001 duplicates that arrangement, only without Springsteen telling the crowd, "We need a little quiet."</p><p>But, unfortunately, the High Hopes recording of "American Skin" highlights everything that's gone wrong with Springsteen's music in the 21st century. It's garish and melodramatic, with a cluttered arrangement and slick production that distracts from its message. The song open with Springsteen singing "41 shots," but his vocals are distorted and distant--a cheap effect. There is some industrial percussion that would have sounded dated in 2000, and there is Tom Morello's guitar solo, which could have been cribbed from some third-tier 80s power ballad. In 2013, the song is too aware of its own import, which means it strains for the same sense of gravity that once came easily. Live, Springsteen was able to play up the contradictions and colliding perspectives fueling the country's race problems, even implicating himself in the process, but now his outrage has curdled into something like dulled resignation.</p><p>Springsteen has struggled in the 2000's to find the best musical vehicle for his thoughts on the state of America. Live, the E Street Band can be a powerhouse, as the sexagenarian continues to exude charisma and energy on stage. The studio, however, is another thing. Nebraska aside, Springsteen has never been a minimalist, but his recent output has been maximalist in all the wrong directions. Rather than the Spectorian wall of sound he perfected on Born to Run and The River, he now dabbles in studio gimmicks that sound both expensive and dated: vocal distortion, caked-on production, pots-and-pans percussion, inert drum loops, a puzzling fascination with Celtic flourishes. On High Hopes the thick arrangements distract from the good songwriting and conceal the bad, often to the extent that it's impossible to discern which is which.</p><p>The result is an album that often sounds salvageable but continually trips over its own ambitions and good intentions. On "Heaven's Wall" the gospel choir overwhelms the song completely, disrupting the careful cadence of the verses and any nuance the lyrics might carry; rather than righteous, it comes across as self-righteous. "Harry's Place" is all setting and no story, with details borrowed from an Elmore Leonard novel. Most tragic may be the closing cover of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream", which begins promisingly with Springsteen's gravelly voice and an accordion mimicking the New York duo's gutter drone. It's a quietly powerful moment, but you just know he's going to do something to ruin it. And sure enough the song builds to a manufactured climax full of corny drum loops and gloppy strings.</p><p>Springsteen is too much of a control freak to escape blame, but perhaps most culpable is Tom Morello, who is apparently a member of the E Street Band now. For the last few years Morello has grown seemingly embarrassed by his rap-rock history with Rage Against the Machine, when making his guitar sound like a turntable carried some cultural weight. He does share with Springsteen a few populist heroes, namely Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck. Otherwise, they apparently have little in common beyond their politics, and Morello sounds awkwardly fitted to these songs. He shreds gracelessly through the cover of the Havalinas' "High Hopes" and clutters "Heaven's Wall" with squall and distortion. When his guitar isn't disruptive, it's simply superfluous. Often it's just dumbfounding: his solos on "The Ghost of Tom Joad"—which gets a passable cock-rock makeover that owes a debt to Rage Against the Machine's cover—sound like David Gilmour sitting in with Cinderella.</p><p>An unwelcome presence, Morello is simply the most obvious of many elements on High Hopes that just don't work. It's all the more unfortunate given that there are actually some redeemable songs here, along with some brief glimpses of Springsteen the rock'n'roll storyteller. Even as he eclipses 60, he's one of the few rock veterans still concerned with actually rocking, which he does convincingly on "Just Like Fire Would" and "Frankie Fell in Love"—two negligible songs that you might dismiss on a better album. Here they sound actually feisty and even ribald, with a fire that is squelched on the more serious numbers. I can't tell if those highs actually redeem the album somewhat or make it even more of a disappointment, but I do know that the out-in-the-streets details of "Frankie Fell in Love" are more humane and meaningful than the grandiose philosophizing of "Hunter of Invisible Game". Instead of trying so hard to live up to the times, perhaps he just needs to work on capturing a moment.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Bruce Springsteen	The Ties That Bind - The River Collection	<p>Bruce Springsteen's ambition is his blessing and his curse. He's always believed that rock & roll is a music that can express people's deepest hopes and dreams and change their lives, and his best work communicates that brilliantly. But Springsteen often seems to doubt his own abilities and struggles under the weight of his own (high) standards, and many of Springsteen's best albums were painstakingly created as he spent months in the studio, searching for the right set of songs and performances that would tell the larger story in his mind. Springsteen is too smart to believe you can will a masterpiece into creation, but he does have a work ethic that suggests nothing worthwhile comes without sweat and sore muscles, and the man who regularly plays energetic three-hour shows has never hesitated to do whatever it takes to get the details just right in the studio, even if the desire is to create something that sounds explosive and spontaneous. After taking his early urban folk tales of cars and girls as far as he could on Born to Run, Springsteen took a long, hard look at the lives of those same kids, now saddled with adult responsibilities and realizing that the American Dream was increasingly out of their grasp, on 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town.</p><p>With 1980's The River, Springsteen sought to expand on those themes while also offering more of the tough, bar-band rock that was his trademark (and often conspicuous in its absence on Darkness), and by the time it was released it had swelled into Springsteen's first two-LP set. After presenting his fans with a grand-scale study of how Darkness on the Edge of Town came into being on the 2010 box set The Promise, Springsteen does the same for The River with The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, which features a newly remastered edition of the original album along with a bonus disc of outtakes (most previously unreleased) and an early single-LP version of the album that Springsteen opted not to release because it failed to tell the story he had envisioned. The short version sounds like the rough draft that it is, though it also includes several songs that didn't appear on the longer final version ("Loose Ends" and "To Be True" in particular are superb songs that simply didn't fit the flow of the album), as well as different versions of a few tracks that do ("The Ties That Bind" contains different lyrics, while "Stolen Car" and "You Can Look [But You Better Not Touch]" feature different arrangements). And the outtakes disc offers 22 variations on the album's themes that point to any number of directions the album could have gone, and if nothing else it says a great deal about Springsteen that he had enough good songs that numbers as strong as "Party Lights," "Roulette," "Where the Bands Are," and "Chain Lightning" could end up on the shelf.</p><p>The Ties That Bind also includes a documentary (on DVD or Blu-ray) on the making of the album, as well as a full concert filmed in 1980 that finds Springsteen & the E Street Band in incendiary form. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, like a high-profile DVD release of the 2000s, is more about the bonus features than the main feature, but the extras lend an invaluable perspective to one of the most important works in Springsteen's catalog, and this set makes it possible to imagine the many chapters that could have been added or removed from the album while still telling the same powerful story, as well as documenting the thought and effort Springsteen put into the process.</p><p>—<strong>Amazon.com</strong></p><hr/><p>'The Ties That Bind: The River Collection' is a comprehensive look at Bruce Springsteen's 'The River' era, one of the most pivotal periods of time in his career. The set contains 52 tracks on 4 CDs with a wealth of unreleased material, and 4 hours of never-before-seen video on 3 DVDs. It is comprised of the original 'The River' double album as released in 1980; the first official release of 'The River: Single Album;' a CD of 1979/80 studio outtakes; a two-DVD film of never-released, newly edited multi-camera footage from Springsteen's famed 1980 show in Tempe, AZ, long rumored but never-before-seen; rare tour rehearsal footage; a brand new documentary "The Ties That Bind" about 'The River;' and a coffee table book of 200 rare or previously unseen photos and memorabilia with a new essay by Mikal Gilmore. </p><p>'The River,' was originally released on October 17, 1980 as a double album and reached #1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. 'The River: Single Album' is the 10-track album that Springsteen recorded in 1979 as a follow up to 1978's 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town' but never released. The fourth CD on the box set is 'The River: Outtakes,' which spans the entire 'The River' sessions in 1979 and 1980. Eleven songs are rarities that have never been released before, and for the most part are completely unheard and unknown even to fans, who have long considered Springsteen's outtakes to be treasured secrets. </p><p>"The Ties That Bind," on one DVD, is a brand new 60-minute documentary that features an intimate interview with Springsteen as he reflects on the tumultuous, extended period writing and recording 'The River.' The film transitions between Springsteen telling the stories behind the music and illustrating them with solo acoustic guitar performances — interspersed with period concert footage and rare photos of Bruce and the band in and out of the studio. The final video component is "Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band: The River Tour, Tempe 1980," a new film produced from footage professionally filmed in 1980 using four cameras and recorded in multitrack audio. The film features 24 songs 2 hours, 40 minutes on 2 DVDs from Springsteen s November 5, 1980 concert at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Widely regarded as one of Springsteen s finest performances, this intense show features early live versions of over half of 'The River' songs. Also included is 20 minutes of footage from the late September, 1980 River Tour rehearsals held in Lititz, PA, showing Springsteen and The E Street Band working through live arrangements of what was then unreleased material from the upcoming album.</p><p>"The Ties That Bind: The River Collection is packaged in a 10" x 12" box with a hardcover 148-page coffee table book containing 200 studio and live photographs most of which have never been seen before plus pages from Springsteen's notebooks, single covers, assets/images and outtakes from the original album package, and other memorabilia documenting the album. Liner notes include a new essay from journalist Mikal Gilmore, the original Rolling Stone album review from 1980, and Springsteen's updated comments about the album from the 1998 "Songs" book.</p><hr/><p>When Bruce Springsteen released The Promise back in 2010, it was a document of what could have been. Although most of the album's songs were recorded during the same sessions that birthed Darkness On the Edge of Town, they contrasted wildly in tone — where Darkness was steeped in working class angst, The Promise had a more romantic outlook. Its arrangements were lusher and its characters found easier escape from their blue-collar confinements, their gazes turned upward to the stars instead of towards the factories pumping out smog below. Even the handful of tunes that popped up on both records received dramatically different treatments. Most notably, The Promise's version of "Racing In the Street" touted a higher key and jaunty fiddle from David Lindley, both of which made it more uplifting than the more funereal original. Likewise, "Factory" was turned from a dour going-to-work song into a more hopeful getting-off-work song.When compiling the final product, Springsteen had a wealth of material to choose from, and for one reason or another — perhaps because he was getting older and had already pushed romanticism to its limit on Born To Run — he chose to explore the shadows. It's no mistake that the title of Darkness On the Edge of Town sounds so much more foreboding than The Promise. It's no mistake that its songs are, for the most part, heavier and more bitter.The Ties That Bind has a similar background. Well, almost. Originally submitted to Columbia Records as a single disc of 10 songs, it got expanded to a whopping 20 after The Boss decided he wanted the album to have more depth and variety. Thus, The River was born, a heartland rock buffet with everything from humorous bar jams ("Cadillac Ranch", "I'm a Rocker", "Ramrod") to soul-crushing folk ballads ("Independence Day", "Drive All Night", the title track) on the menu. What's more is that, even as an 83-minute double album, The River had more than twice as many songs that didn't make the cut.And that's where The Ties That Bind starts to differ from The Promise, despite them both being companion pieces to already existing albums. Since Springsteen and The E Street Band plowed through the former's sessions with a singular aesthetic in mind (American realism where the stakes range from trivial to life-threatening) as opposed to two different sides of the same coin, the collection doesn't feel like a bizarro version of The River as much as an extension of it. A title like …And Now, More of The River would have been just as appropriate.Fortunately, The River — and thus The Ties That Bind — happens to be a damn near perfect album. This was in Springsteen's heyday of sketching crucially unremarkable (i.e., realistic) characters to explore themes larger than themselves (and, for a time, himself), not the other way around. "Stolen Car" does indeed feature a car thief, but it's really about marital entropy. On The Ties That Bind, several of the River outtakes function as its sister songs, also doling out loss through low-level criminal activity: The most obvious is a more boardwalk-friendly "Stolen Car" (Danny Federici steps out front-and-center with his accordion) before both "The Man Who Got Away" and "Roulette" open on a turd on the run — one who's flying solo and another who's been forced to take his wife and kids with him. There are also everyday Joes and Janes who get caught up in crime even when they're not looking for it, such as the guy who sees his girlfriend gunned down by gang crossfire in "Stray Bullet". As over-the-top as that sounds, the band keeps pulp at bay with Steven Van Zandt's ripped-open background falsetto and a rare bit of soprano sax from Clarence Clemons.Of course, The River isn't solely about criminals and neither is its single-disc counterpart or its mammoth compilation of outtakes. And since all three of them are included here in order — The River on discs one and two, The Ties That Bind on disc three, then all of the outtakes (first the unreleased ones, then those already heard on 1998's Tracks box set and various singles) on disc four — you can continue playing the mirror game with all of the varying subject matter and musical formats. Weekend warriors get their due in "Out In the Street" (The River), "Cindy" (The Ties That Bind), and the fret-jumping lead single "Meet Me In the City" (the outtakes). Elsewhere, E Street flaunts its bar band cred in the dispensable but fun as hell "Sherry Darling" (The River), "Chain Lightning", and "Paradise By the "C"" (both on the outtakes), all of them shaken loose by group vocals, handclaps, and beer-soaked chatter. And since every last bit of music — serious and silly alike — places the same high currency on hooks and furious meat-and-potatoes rock, you could pick any 10 songs out of the box set's 52 and have one hell of an LP. Even Springsteen himself has confessed he's not sure why something as pummeling as "Roulette" was scrapped in favor of a throwaway track like "Crush On You". The River Collection isn't a glimpse of what could have been — it's raw proof that The River sessions produced too many good songs for one album (even a double album) to contain.</p> <p>— <strong>Dan Caffrey</strong></p><hr/><p>The River doesn't flow—it floods. Bruce Springsteen's fifth album gushes forth with the fury of a burst dam, delivering torrents of despair, inspiration, heartbreak, and joy. Coming after the deliberate twin masterpieces of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, records epic in scope but precise in execution, The River not only appears to be a mess but embodies the classic definition of a double album: it seems to be a clearinghouse for every song Bruce Springsteen had at the ready in 1980. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection shows just how wrong that assumption is. Expanding the original 20-song double album to a 4xCD set supplemented with video, it laughs at the notion that the original album was much too much by underscoring exactly how Springsteen intended the album to overwhelm.</p><p>Initially, Springsteen planned to follow 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town with an album called The Ties That Bind but he withdrew the record in the fall of 1979, believing that it wasn't "big enough." This claim came from the stage during a 2009 performance of The River at Madison Square Garden, with Bruce going on to say, "I wanted to capture the themes that I'd been writing about on Darkness. I wanted to keep those characters with me and at the same time added the music that made our live shows so much fun and enjoyable for our audience." On this box, the scrapped The Ties That Bind gets an official airing as the third disc on the set—here it's dubbed The River [Single Album]—and it does indeed play like a truncated, miniature version of The River, containing in its 10 tracks seven of the double-album's songs, along with two alternate versions of tunes that wound up on the released record. What's striking is what's absent: shorn of its party songs, the record feels gloomy and haunted—even "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)" in a lonesome Sun rockabilly incarnation feels like a transmission from the lonely black of night. It reiterates many of the themes of Darkness, only without aggression, fury, or precision, the very things that give that record a lift that fights against its undercurrents of hopelessness.</p><p>Surely recognizing this deficit, Springsteen spent roughly another year in the studio, reviving old songs and writing new ones, arriving at full-blown, completed recordings of most of these tunes, then picking and choosing from his surplus to create the final album. The result was enough material for another double album, presented here as The Ties That Bind, a collection that runs two songs longer the 1980 double-LP but winds up six minutes shorter. This is an absurd amount of shelved material—and, even with this abundance, there are a handful of bootlegged cuts that didn't make the grade. There's a lot of unheard music here, even if some tracks are colored with new Bruce vocals, a slightly sour grace-note that is only notable upon close inspection.</p><p>Listening through the box, it's hard not to be struck by Springsteen's labor-intensive creative method. He knew the broad outline of what he wanted to achieve, so he kept tweaking his material in the studio, rearranging and recording until he found just the right emotion. If The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 proves how Bob Dylan sought to capture the lightning of a live performance, Springsteen always is seduced by the illusion of a record: sure, he's invigorated by live performance—and the Tempe concert included here is tremendous, the E-Street Band at the peak of their power—but he sculpts his albums out of tracks that are powerful as recordings, not simply songs.</p><p>This is especially true of The River, which Bruce loaded up with the purest, hardest, and happiest rock'n'roll the E-Street Band ever cut in the studio. "She's the One" pulsated to a beat borrowed from Bo Diddley and Darkness surged with desperate passion, but Bruce's first four records rarely touched on the ecstatic joy that can be had from just making noise. The River is full of these moments ("Sherry Darling", "Crush on You", "I'm a Rocker", "Cadillac Ranch"), and some of the weightier items trade in this same sense of exuberance—a sense of desperation cuts against the grain of the sunny hook on "Hungry Heart", and "Two Hearts" spins headfirst into unfettered romanticism. But this music is so simple, so visceral, that it's often been tagged as throwaway, the detritus surrounding the haunting "The River", "The Price You Pay", and "Stolen Car".</p><p>Thing is, these throwaways give The River its cinematic scope. Some of the newer additions were cut from a familiar forlorn cloth ("Independence Day", the closing pair of "Drive All Night" and "Wreck on the Highway") while "Point Blank" and "Jackson Cage" split the difference between the celebration and sorrow. But the biggest distinction between The River and the original Ties That Bind is this full-on bash, funny and furious and entirely sincere in its worship of the sounds rocking frat houses and AM radio in a '60s that didn't belong to the Beatles. It's the Springsteen album that can easily slip onto any show on Little Steven's Underground Garage, and this party winds up providing an ideal counterpoint to the sweeter, sadder moments on The River.</p><p>Take the second side, which opens with "Hungry Heart"—Bruce's first genuine hit single, reaching number five on a combination of its hook and Springsteen's general momentum—then dwells upon the cinematic escape "Out in the Street" and serves up two breakneck rockers before settling into the dreaminess of "I Wanna Marry You" and the stark "The River", the latter two hitting harder due to the companions. Each side is structured similarly, with the last song tipping slightly toward melancholy, the cumulative effect suggesting there's no separating pleasure from the pain. It all comes at once and, depending on mood, The River either seems like the happiest or saddest of Bruce's records: in its mess lies a mirror that reflects the listener's state of mind.</p><p>The Ties That Bind illustrates this sprawl was no accident. Within these 22 rejects—some of them sneaking out as B-sides or on previous reissues, including the 1998 box Tracks and the bonus disc on 2003's The Essential Bruce Springsteen—Springsteen explores the same terrain as he does on The River: urban romance, accidental violence, working-man's blues, and restless nights. Like its parent, The Ties That Bind achieves a delicate balance between adult despair and adolescent freedom: he may dwell upon "Little White Lies" and "The Time That Never Was", but he also borrows a song title from Claudine Clark ("Party Lights") and tips a hat to Connie Francis' beach classic Where the Boys Are ("Where the Bands Are"). Enough great songs didn't make a cut that it's possible to cobble together a killer single album from the outtakes—one that would open with the breathless "Meet Me in the City" and contain the cloistered paranoia of "The Man Who Got Away", the blank desperation of "Roulette", the open-hearted "Ricky Wants a Man of Her Own" and "From Small (Big Things One Day Come)", a heightened Chuck Berry story song Bruce turned over to Dave Edmunds. But like the completed album, what resonates is the magnitude of the sprawl itself.</p><p>As they spill out, the songs play off each other, accentuating the sorrow or celebration heard in their predecessors. Combing through these outtakes, it quickly becomes clear how Springsteen, Van Zandt, and Jon Landau constructed each track to deliver its own specific visceral thrill and then culled through their finished product to find the cuts that fit their intended design. Some of these rejects rely on that headstrong old time rock'n'roll—"Living on the Edge of the World" bops along to its syncopated swing, "Paradise by the C" is a roadhouse jam highlighting Clarence Clemons—but others play like ripostes to the E-Street Band's peers: the live "Held Up Without a Gun" (which would later morph into the finished "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)") careens like Elvis Costello & the Attractions, the chiming guitars of "Take 'Em As They Come" seem like an answer to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, while "I Wanna Be With You" pulses to the Iron City rush of Joe Grushecky & the Houserockers.</p><p>Thirty-five years after the release of The River, it's easy to think of Bruce Springsteen as existing on a separate plane from such contemporary kindred spirits or perhaps as somebody who only belongs to part of a self-styled lineage that runs through Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. By adding The Times That Bind, both the scrapped '79 LP and this new double-disc collection of outtakes, to The River, this box highlights the plain, prosaic ways he belonged to his time. On these 52 songs, Springsteen sings about gas shortages, cold beer, unemployment agencies, busted dreams, and Burt Reynolds, fleeting images of a blue collar America that unknowingly was entering its decay but these words are married to the sound of a working band that knows it has to work, aware that it has to have songs to fuel those marathon three hour shows.</p><p>Springsteen never really let these straight-up rockers be part of his records again—maybe on Born in the U.S.A., but both "Darlington County" and "Working on the Highway" end in tears—but he also never quite worked the same way again, producing such a ridiculous surplus of finished material as he set out on his quest for bigger, greater things. The River brought Bruce to those heights, giving him his first number one album and Top 10 single, but it's hard not to think of it as not a beginning but an end, the last record where he and the E-Street Band were not the biggest band in the land but merely the best. In that light, piling on a ton of unreleased music, all in the same spirit and feel as the final album and nearly as good as what made the cut, feels like a gift. And for those who may think four CDs and three DVDs are too much, consider this: for an album that is all about contradictions, excess and mess, more of everything is most certainly a good thing.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Spyro Gyra	The Best Of	This record needs editing
Spyro Gyra	The Deep End	Edit this record
St Germain	Tourist
Ralph Stanley	Ralph Stanley
Starland Vocal Band	Starland Vocal Band
Steeleye Span	Parcel Of Rogues
Steely Dan	Katy Lied
Steely Dan	Aja
Steely Dan	Aja
Steely Dan	Remastered The Best Of
Stein & Walder	Transit
Martin Stephenson	Gladsome, Humor & Blue
Mike Stern	Standards (And Other Songs)
Al Stewart	Year Of The Cat	<p>Al Stewart had found his voice on <i>Past, Present & Future</i> and found his sound on <i>Modern Times</i>. He then perfected it all on 1976's <i>Year of the Cat</i>, arguably his masterpiece. There is no overarching theme here, as there was on its two immediate predecessors, but the impossible lushness of Alan Parsons' production and Stewart's evocative continental narratives give the record a welcome feeling of cohesion that keeps the record enchanting as it moves from "Lord Grenville" to "Midas Shadow" to "Broadway Hotel," before it ends with the haunting title track. Along the way, Stewart doesn't dwell too deeply in any area, preferring to trace out mysteries with his evocative lyrical imagery and a spinning array of self-consciously sophisticated music, songs that evoke American and European folk and pop with a deliberate grace. This could be unbearably precious if it didn't work so well. Stewart is detached from his music, but only in the sense that he gives this album a stylish elegance, and Parsons is his perfect foil, giving the music a rich, panoramic sweep that mimics Stewart's globe-trotting songs. The result is a tremendous example of how good self-conscious progressive pop can be, given the right producer and songwriter -- and if you're a fan of either prog or pop and haven't given Al Stewart much thought, prepare to be enchanted.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Al Stewart	Time Passages	<p>Year of the Cat brought Al Stewart a genuine worldwide smash with its title track, and for its successor, he did make a few concessions. These, however, were slight -- just a slight increase of soft rock productions, an enhancement of the lushness that marked not only Year of the Cat but also Modern Times. These happened to be welcome adjustments to Stewart's sound, since they increased the dreamy continental elegance at the core of his work. And that's why Time Passages is the equal of Year of the Cat -- it may be more streamlined, but the adjustments to his sound and the concessions to the mainstream just increase the soft grace of his eloquent historical pop epics. It's possible to view this as too precious, because it is pitched at an audience who believes the common-day concerns of pop are piffle, but this is exceptionally well-crafted, from Stewart's songs, where even three-minute songs seem like epics, to Alan Parsons' cinematic arrangements and productions. This added concentration on the texture of the recording, ensuring that it was clean, spacious, and gentle, with a welcoming surface. Of course, this means that Time Passages can work very well as background music, but it also reveals much upon concentrated listening -- enough to make it stand proudly next to Modern Times and Year of the Cat as one of Al Stewart's very best albums.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>

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