By Neil McCormick (THE TELEGRAPH VERSIONE ON LINE)
1. High Hopes
A big, anthemic, percussive opener about seeking hope in a hopeless place. Originally a folk song by Tim Scott McConnell, Springsteen first covered it for an EP in 1996. This rocking new Tom Morello-infused version fits the angry yet optimistic spirit of Springsteen’s worldwide Wrecking Ball tour.
2. Harry’s Place
Morello brings punky drive this snapshot of the decadent energy of a drug and drinks den, first recorded for The Rising. Springsteen writes with a kind of beatnik poeticism reminiscent of his earliest albums, but there’s a tough wisdom in there too in his acceptance rather than condemnation of a nefarious place where you might find “the key to the box you locked yourself in”.
3. American Skin (41 Shots)
A synthy pulse runs through this angry anthem inspired by a police shooting of an innocent immigrant. Inspired by an incident in 1999, it was revived for the E Street Band’s live set after the shooting of US teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012.
4. Just Like Fire Would
A sharp, straightforward cover of Australian punk band The Saints, riffing on ideas of passion and a life on the road.
5. Down in the Hole
The rhythm of a grinding machine clunks away beneath the ghostly, folky ambience of this brooding song about digging for a body in the wreckage of a disaster. “I’m buried to my heart here in this hurt,” sings Springsteen, amid a wash of sonic textures. Originally from sessions for his 9/11 album, The Rising.
6. Heaven’s Wall
An out and out gospel rocker. There’s a lot of energy and excitement as Bruce the preachers exhorts us to raise our hands, but out of its live context it’s hard to square the questioning humanism of Springsteen’s persona with the unambiguous born-again zeal of a salvation lyric couched in Biblical language.
7. Frankie Fell In Love
Country guitar and violin lead into a celebratory vignette about news of a small town engagement: “World peace going to break out!” With its effervescent Felice Brothers vibe, it sounds like something from the uplifting 2009 E Street comeback album Working On A Dream.
8. This is Your Sword
Another religious song, Springsteen promises “days of miracle” and “the power of love revealed” to a folky melody reminiscent of Wild Mountain Thyme. Before the angry and politicised Wrecking Ball, Springsteen says he scrapped an album’s worth of gospel songs. This should have stayed scrapped.
9. Hunter of Invisible Game
An acoustic waltz with lush, strange strings, this is another song with a Christian core, yet the poetic ambiguity of the language leaves it satisfyingly open to interpretation. There are late period Dylanesque touches in the image of a hobo hunter moving through a burned out American landscape. The quarry is presumably the human soul, though it is hard to tell if the hunter is Christ or Satan.
10. The Ghost of Tom Joad (2013)
Essentially the rocked up version of this Springsteen classic from the last tour, driven by fierce idealism but succumbing to a showboating, effects-laden Morello solo that sounds ludicrous out of the live context. “This version starts as a plaintive ballad, which feels like a lament, and becomes a full-bore rocker that feels like a threat,” according to Morello. Or like a Pink Floyd wig out.
11. The Wall
A sparse, stately elegy for Walter Cichon, an influential local rock icon with The Misfits from Springsteen’s New Jersey youth, who went missing in action in Vietnam in 1968. A sombre Springsteen contemplates the lost potential of all those names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
12. Dream Baby Dream
Springsteen makes a harmonium sounds as strange and modern as a synthesizer on an atmospheric, Roy Orbison-esque version of a song by New York electro-punk duo Suicide that winds the album down on a lovely, elegiac and romantic note.
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