All Our Youth and Beauty, it’s Been Given to the Dust

Let’s get this out of the way first, the last Bruce Springsteen album was painfully bad, I would sooner listen to Born This Way all the way through than listen to Working on a Dream with all its hopey change songs. Optimism does not suit Bruce very well and is at his best when channeling the angry and downtrodden. But if Waiting on a Dream was his hope in a transformative Barack Obama presidency, released just as he was being inaugurating, calling the follow up Wrecking Ball could show just what Bruce thinks of the current administration just as it is about to start its campaign to be reelected. And if the title track does paint a big enough picture, song titles like Shackled and Drawn, The Depression, and Death to my Hometown (which gives allusions to his Born in the U.S.A. track) should.

With the painfully bad last album, things did not sound much better with the release of the first single We Take Care of Our Own which sounded as lackluster as much of the last album even though it sounded slightly angrier. Thankfully the rest of the album gets better after the song kicks off Wrecking Ball. Where We Take Care of Our Own was a huge swing and miss with Bruce going for one of his anthemic songs along the line of Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A. or The Rising, the rest of the album sounds like Ghost of Tom Joad if it were backed by his Pete Segar Sessions players. Songs like Death to My Hometown and Rocky Ground would not have sounded out of place on the Segar Sessions. Well Rocky Round does also include an inexplicable rap at the end of it which thankfully was not provided by Bruce himself.

Aside from some of his previous work, some of the songs on the new album are reminiscent of the recent The Nightwatchman album by Tom Morello like Shackled and Drawn. So it should be not much of a surprise that Morello actually shows up and contributes a guitar solo on two songs that you do not even need to look at the liner notes to tell that it is Morello on the guitars. But the album is not all doom and gloom for the 99%, near the end of Springsteen breaks out Land of Hope and Dreams, a song that date as far back as The Rising era which draws from the classic The Impressions tune People Get Ready. The song also features one of the last sax solos ever recorded by Clarence Clemons which is a fitting end to his career with the E Street Band.

Song to Download – Land of Hope and Dreams

Wrecking Ball gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.