YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS by Tris McCall

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - Magic

From: The United States of America, mystic version. The small-towns that the Boss sings about on Magic ("Long Walk Home" in particular) surely still exist somewhere, tucked behind the Wal-Marts on the blue highways. I've never been to one, though, and I doubt that the singer is hanging out in those wholesome town squares. As he's aged, Springsteen's concept of America - always informed by filmed entertainment - has become increasingly indebted to Hollywood. That should surprise nobody; he's a part-time Californian now, and has been for years.

Format: Short full-length; eleven official songs. A not-so-hidden extra track has been appended to the set. It's a piano ballad about the death of one of his roadies; it's moving, but hardly essential. "Terry's Song" is a slightly more humble album closer than "Devil's Arcade", and a minimalist, or just a folkie, might argue that it's better. But since nothing about Magic is humble, it just feels out of place.

Fidelity: Fantastic. You can hear the fingers on the strings, the hammer-strikes inside Roy Bittan's piano, the crack of the snare, the wind rushing through Clarence Clemons's horn, and every grunt, groan, and cracked-voice holler from the maestro's throat.

Genre: Bombastic U.S. theater-rock. Brucie established this genre with The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle, and he's been expanding on it, intermittently, ever since then. The recent surge of hipster interest in Springsteen's back catalogue may have prompted him to attempt a return to his classic sound - or at least to the dramatic tone of The Rising.

Arrangements: If you've paid any attention to American popular music over the past thirty years (or if you've heard a Hold Steady or Arcade Fire record), you know exactly how it goes. The songs start with a simple riff, played either on the bass or electric guitar - or, on rare occasions, a classically-inspired piano arpeggio. Then the Boss begins to sing. He takes it by himself for a few couplets, maybe into the first chorus. At some point - usually just before the second verse - Max Weinberg brings the group in with one of his world-famous bar-band fills. The Professor fires up one of those two-octave countermelodies on the glockenspiel, or the high keys on the Wurlitzer; by the second chorus, Springsteen's proletarian grumble is enrobed in processed harmonies. After the bridge (there is always a bridge), either Clemons or Danny Federici takes a ride into a final chorus seemingly sung by the entire rank and file of the AFL-CIO. There's plenty of supplementary six-string, too, but as usual, I'll be damned if I can remember any of it. If Springsteen had ever been a real guitar guy, he would've found a way to get more out of Nils Lofgren than he does here.

What's this record about?: Forced hope, however unconvincing, made The Rising an extreme outlier in Springsteen's catalog - as all long-time fans know, The Boss is a serious downer. While it would have been cruel for him to throw cold water on the national engine in 2002, six years later, the gloves are off. Magic , then, is a bookend album; one signaling the end of the Bush era as surely as The Rising marked its beginning. In between those releases, Springsteen took to the stump on behalf of John Kerry, and shared in the ignominy and existential despair of the '04 defeat. "Last To Die" turns Kerry's famous anti-war question into a song more thoughtful - but not much more entertaining - than any of the Massachusetts Senator's speeches; elsewhere, The Boss takes on the Iraq War in language less sloganeering. "Gypsy Biker", an elegantly-written tale of one soldier's return home in a body-bag, would feel emotionally-manipulative if it wasn't so consistent with modern American facts. Likewise, the flag-salute in "Long Walk Home" reads like a message to Attorney General Mukasey - when Springsteen sings "that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things set in stone/ who we are, what we'll do, (dramatic pause) and what we won't", it's rendition and torture he's tacitly condemning. But while the shadow of the Iraq War hangs over Magic, the singer is reluctant to name names or delve into specifics; an exercise in protest journalism this is not. Instead, he relies on his well-known vocabulary of ominous Western-American tropes to set the mood. One could even say that from time to time, he lets all the Zane Grey/John Wayne business get the better of him: on "Living In The Future", there's gunpowder, a dirty sky, highways, bootheels, a pistol, and sundown, and that's just in one verse, folks. As with The Rising , it's hard not to harbor a suspicion that the metaphors imported from the movies are getting beyond the author's control. The title track is a spooky allegory for government dirty tricks, but for every striking line here, there's another "cinematic" image that feels trite by Springsteen's own lofty standards. In 2008, it's not too difficult to evoke feelings of dread in listeners with political consciences: we've all lived through war years when, as he sings in "Last To Die", "we don't measure the blood we've drawn anymore." We've got some terrible karma on our hands, we all know it, and sometimes it seems like the Boss is just pointing out the obvious here. Certainly there is nothing on Magic that adds to the brilliant crypto-political observations made on Devils & Dust - but, to be fair, nobody else has had anything new to say about the Iraq War since 2005, either. We're just slugging it out mindlessly now, drumming our fingers on the table and waiting for withdrawal, or reprisal, or Ragnarok. Ours is a nation exhausted, and that mood Brucie captures perfectly: Magic is weary, dispirited, and pessimistic, and none too sanguine about anybody's ability to break through with a progressive message. "Radio Nowhere", the lead single, is, on one level, just a cranky old rock star's complaint about a music industry that doesn't need him anymore - but on another, it's a plea for a voice (or for many voices) that can cut through the nonsense and deliver an antiestablishment broadside. Sadly, it is clear that the singer no longer believes it is his own. He's turned his attention to more ruminative subject matter, and Magic is at its best when the Boss indulges in detailed small-town poetry. "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" and "You'll Be Comin' Down" find Springsteen in much better charge of his own iconography. These songs are colored by wartime-gloom, but don't address the combat directly; they're little slices of hopeless 21st Century life, grown-up versions of "Darkness On The Edge Of Town". He hasn't entirely abandoned the weird and engrossing religious-romantic calculus he developed on Devils & Dust : it re-emerges on Bruce-by-the-numbers "I'll Work For Your Love", and more persuasively on "Devil's Arcade", the album's most intriguing cut. There, the war and the desert become fodder for a strange set of reflections on heroism, hope, and sex. It's one of the few times on Magic where it feels like Springsteen is covering conceptual ground with the speed we've all become accustomed to over the years.

The singer: All the familiar Boss voices are back: The Sixties-pop balladeer takes the mic for "Your Own Worst Enemy", the swaggering Americana-rocker leads on "Radio Nowhere", the bar-room shouter barrels his way through "You'll Be Coming Down", the breathy mutterer (a recent misdevelopment for Brucie) commandeers "Magic", the arty folkie walks us through the "Devil's Arcade", and the Top 40 maestro, MIA for many seasons, drops in for "Girls In Their Summer Clothes". The rapid changes of pace would feel discontinuous coming from another singer, but we know them all as Springsteen, so very little conceptual dissonance is felt. Those who loved the Seeger Sessions might miss the carefree approach the singer took on that set, but given the weighty subject matter, Magic required some over-the-top intensity. We've been putting up with his vocal vainglory for thirty years now, and we've ushered Born To Run into the rock and roll canon despite it. Relax, nothing here is as melodramatic as the performance on "Backstreets".

The band: Though much was made of the piecemeal recording process - the band had to work around, among other things, Danny Federici's illness and Max Weinberg's late-night TV schedule - Magic finds most of the E Streeters in fine form. Props go to Gary Tallent in particular, who has never sounded better. Gone are the beer-'n'-pretzels basslines of yore, replaced here by smart, arty, confident parts, each discharged with youthful vigor. I think that's Jeremy Chatzky of Seeger Sessions (and Laura Cantrell) fame bowing a double-bass on "Girls In Their Summer Clothes;" if it's Tallent, he gets credit for expanding his sound, too. The Big Man's infirmity is no secret, but when he steps up to the microphone for his solos, he proves there's plenty of industrial-strength force left in those granite lungs. Clemons's ride on "Radio Nowhere" might not get us all back on the Freeway Of Love, but it affords us all a nice cruise down an access road somewhere. Meanwhile, The Professor keeps doing his thing: "I'll Work For Your Love" opens with the usual fussy piano arpeggios, and imparts some extra Spector-ian grandiosity (not that it really needed it) to "Summer Clothes" and "Long Walk Home". Federici overdrives his Hammond for a rip through "Livin' In The Future;" elsewhere, he's content to blast away in the background, alternately invoking wide-open spaces and portending carnivalesque doom. Little Stevie adds his strum-and-holler act; it's as dated as anything the E Streeters do, but it generally works. If there's one noticeable flaw here, it's that there isn't enough Patti Scialfa - violinist Soozie Tyrell is a bigger presence on Magic than Mrs. Boss, and that shouldn't be. But on an album this nostalgic, it was probably inevitable that Springsteen would return to the old boy's-club sound.

The songs: "Your Own Worst Enemy" and "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" really do sound like Magnetic Fields circa 69 Love Songs . That may seem like a strange comparison to you, but The Boss hangs out with Arcade Fire and The Killers; he's aware of the newfangled sounds. Stephin Merritt has been ripping him off for years; here he gets a chance to return the favor. Elsewhere, Springsteen sticks to traditional songwriting patterns he knows well, and not always because he's the one who popularized them. More on this in the "what's not so good" section.

What distinguishes this album from others of its genre?: Not much, but let's be fair: The Boss invented this genre. Nobody's accusing him of coattail-riding here. Repeating himself, maybe.

What's not so good?: Bruce Springsteen has, from time to time, stopped all the ruckus to demonstrate to us that he's an inventive, top-flight pop songwriter. With "Summer Clothes", he flashes those skills at us once again: Great verse, great melody, solid bridge, irresistible chorus. If you like pop songs, you'll love this one. Strange, then, that he chooses not to repeat the trick anywhere else on Magic . It's not that the other songs don't work, because they all do; they're all, as my dad likes to say about Oscar-winning middlebrow movies, "well done". They're also stupendously derivative - sometimes of the lengthy Springsteen back catalog, but often of other people's songs. As has surely been pointed out by other rock journalists, "Radio Nowhere" is "867-5309". Mind you, I don't mean it sounds like "867-5309", I mean it is "867-5309". If Tommy Tutone decided to be pathetic enough to sue, he'd win. "Livin' In The Future" takes "Tenth-Avenue Freeze-Out" back from Tom Petty, who'd turned it into "Don't Do Me Like That;" in any case, there's nothing here that hasn't been rehashed and served up in diners up and down the Turnpike for years. "I'll Work For Your Love" is such a quintessential piece of Americana that it barely can be said to exist on its own; even the extra track is a naked Dylan lift. It's wrong to say that Springsteen needs compositional ideas, because as he showed on Devils & Dust (and intermittently here,) his muse is very much intact. But the Boss would've improved this set immensely by pushing his writing a bit. Hey, nobody is asking him to go twelve-tone on us. But borrowing riffs and tunes from John Cougar Mellencamp records is beneath him.

Recommended?: Magic is an enjoyable listen. As a state-of-the-nation address from rock music's most lucid social commentator (still!), it often demands close engagement. But the backward-looking production and arrangement choices - and the quality of the melodies - makes this a tough record to spin many times. And that's odd for Springsteen: usually, because of the enigmatic core hidden behind the splashy, theatrical performances, his albums stand up to hundreds of listens. I could take out my well-worn copy of The River right now, put it on, and notice something new about the set. Magic , by contrast, shows you everything right up front. After taking the Nineties off to go fly-fishing or something, this has been an exhausting decade for The Boss; his advocacy work has been genuinely commendable, and by all accounts, the shows have been great. But if all he was going to do was repeat himself and put hackneyed John Kerry slogans to music, we didn't really need a new record from him this soon.

Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Not on mainstream radio, that's for sure. Bruce Springsteen has been exiled to the AAA airwaves, where he now jostles for airtime with the likes of Ryan Bingham and Sylvie Lewis. Top 40 deejays gave "Radio Nowhere" its obligatory spin, and then returned to the business of pimping Souljah Boy. But one of the many cool things about being Bruce Springsteen is that it doesn't much matter - alternative distribution sources open up like Ali Baba's cavern for living legends with the magic words. This is the first Springsteen set that has seriously interested webloggers, and hipsters who usually fuss over Menomena and the like found room in their web caches for MP3s of "Radio Nowhere", "Girls In Their Summer Clothes", and "Your Own Worst Enemy." Odder - and likely more effective - support came from Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, who used his popular sports show on WFAN as an unlikely platform to rave about the album. In a way, the songs on Magic fit in better on talk radio than they do on the mainstream dial: after all, they're meant to prompt discussion. Those who don't care to pay attention to AM blather can head to a brick and mortar store, and be one of many thousands to plunk down $15 for a copy. Magic is wildly outselling Devils & Dust , proving once again that the mainstream public prefers Springsteen the histrionic, over-the-top rocker to Springsteen the mysterious and iconographic storyteller. He's at his best when he figures out how to combine the two approaches; I know, I know, it's hard to do.

Find more Tris McCall at www.trismccall.net