Bruce Springsteen's new album Wrecking Ball: track by track review
The new Bruce Springsteen album, Wrecking Ball, was unveiled to the media today at a playback in Paris. Here are Neil McCormick’s first impressions, track by track.
1. We Take Care of Our Own
Muscular anthem of blue-collar pride and American togetherness. As stirring as the first single is, only little background touches of strings and echoes keep it from being Springsteen-by-numbers. The uplifting lyrics are just generic enough to have already been adopted by Obama for his re-election campaign, which might be considered ironic when the political anger that drives the album seems to stem from a nation that is not really taking care of its own, and where Springsteen claims to be “knocking on the door that holds the throne” and deploring “good intentions gone dry as a bone”.
2. Easy Money
A stomping rock beat houses a Celtic soul romp, with strumming acoustic guitars and fiddles. Its zydeco-meets-glam-rock jolliness is undermined when you realise that it’s the song of a couple of hustlers prepared to do violence to fill their wallets. Springsteen is whooping and wailing like mugging is fun, but his real target is the bigger economic crimes that underpin his outlaw anthem. “All those fat cats will just think it’s funny,” his small-time hood acknowledges of his petty misdemeanours, “looking for easy money”.
3. Shackled and Drawn
Like a chaingang blues with an Irish lilt, Springsteen channels the exuberant energy of the folk songs he recorded for the Seeger sessions, where even a lament sounds like a party. “What’s a poor boy to do in a world gone wrong?” he calls, but makes it universal and political when his shackled narrator turns his attention to the party going on “up on banker’s hill”, where “it’s still fat and easy”.
4. Jack of All Trades
A mordant waltz, underpinned by a slow arpeggio piano figure, this is another lament for the plight of the unemployed, delivered like a 1950s rock’n’roll lullaby. There is no doubt who the villains are in Springsteen’s latest epistle from the American frontline: “The banker man grows fat / The working man grows thin / It’s all happened before /And it’ll happen again”.
Effective in its own right, with a lonely trumpet adding soulful flourishes, the major chord sequences are perhaps just a bit too predictable. You could say these are folk songs for a new depression, but does the message risk being blunted by the over-familiarity of the medium?
5. Death to My Hometown
A martial beat drives along this folky ramble about a ghost town, destroyed not by “cannon ball” or “powder flash”, although the Civil War connotations are kept up with tin whistles piping and an ethereal choir haunting the chorus. In a Dylanesque coda, blame is laid once again at the feet of villainous bankers, or rather, in the archaic language Springsteen employs, “the robber barons”.
6. This Depression
Equating depression emotional and economic, Springsteen pits a delicate melody against a harsh, sledgehammer drum pattern to sombre effect. Deft little sonic touches keep a dark little song burning, with an atmospheric echoing lead solo and hints of ghostly voices.
7. Wrecking Ball
The title track has the slow burn of classic E Street Band, a defiant narrative driven by a thrashed acoustic guitar, the band swelling and subsiding as it follows the Boss’s vocal lead, always threatening to explode. When the blast comes, it is led by trumpets, not saxophone or electric guitar, a flavour that adds to the sense that Springsteen is looking back to a musical time before rock and roll for his inspiration. His exhortation to “hold tight to your anger” seems to be the core message of this lyrically dark yet musically uplifiting album..
8. You’ve Got It
Light relief, in the form of an optimistic love song, a little pop rock gem driven by the interplay of acoustic and electric guitars and full of pithy couplets. “No school ever taught it / But baby you’ve got it / Now come on give it to me”
9. Rocky Ground
The track where a new idea of Springsteen really breaks the surface. A sampled cry of “I’m a soldier” introduces an understated female chorus phrase sung over a downbeat, echoing looped drum pattern. The ambience hints at the brooding soul of Philadelphia. Lyrics evoke biblical language, with the money lenders in the temple still the focus of attention, but as a gospel choir pitches in, all these disparate elements start to fuse into a bold, weird 21st-century anthem of hope. Is this the first Springsteen song to feature a rapper?
10. Land of Hope and Dreams
Picking up on this nu-gospel quality, Springsteen strikes out for rocking E Street uplift over loops and samples. This universal chorus has been a staple of Springsteen shows for a long time, and it is great to hear it finally find its place on an album. No one else could sing a cliché like “This train carries saints and sinners” and still sound not just like they mean it, but that they are reminding us of something vital. There is even a sinuous sax solo, the ghost of the Big Man.
“All aboard,” Springsteen roars, and makes you want to jump on. He doesn’t make the mistake of overstating his case. It’s a grand finale to an album that aims at a classic, ancient sense of folk protest.
11. We Are Alive
A campfire song for ghosts of the oppressed, martyred strikers, protesters and immigrant workers, with Springsteen strumming and whistling while a Mariachi band kicks in to celebrate the eternal possibility of good triumphing over bad as an idea, if not a reality.
It is an uplifting end to a downbeat album, that tries to channel a spirit of folk protest via roots and folk into modern-day stadium rock. One playback is not enough to tell whether Springsteen has really achieved his aim. Are the songs too simplistic to stand with the classics in his canon, or do they strike the right notes of familiar form, adult emotion and spirited delivery to repeat in the listener’s psyche? Time will tell. But it is reassuring to find that at least one old rocker is still angry and impassioned, and desperate to make a difference.
'Wrecking Ball’ is released by Columbia on March 5
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