Springsteen's "Devils & Dust"

[MK]

The Tribune printed a review. Their critic is a Springsteen fan, but unlike Dave Marsh and some others, he's not a total fanatic - he gave the last album a lukewarm review, calling Springsteen on some pretty bad writing and a few bad songs too many on a bloated, 70+ minute album.

Lukewarm review on this one, too, but he criticizes the production more.

Springsteen pulls his punches on latest album

By Greg Kot
Tribune music critic
Published April 24, 2005

After reuniting with the E Street Band for "The Rising" (2002) and cleaning up at the box office on tour, Bruce Springsteen temporarily mothballs the arena rock on his latest album, "Devils & Dust" (Columbia), due in stores Tuesday.

The disc can be heard as the final part of an acoustic trilogy that spans three decades. Springsteen's two previous attempts at making stripped-down, semiplugged recordings were hit and miss. Part 1 arrived in 1982, with the fugitive psychodramas of "Nebraska." Essentially a home demo recording that initially baffled newly won fans, "Nebraska" has only increased in stature since its release and become one of Springsteen's classics.

In 1995, the singer returned to acoustic mode on "The Ghost of Tom Joad." It comes off as a well-intentioned dud, with Springsteen mumbling carefully observed lyrics about blue-collar workers and desperate immigrants. It's the sound of solemnity rather than music, with mush-mouthed singing and slight melodies.

"Devils & Dust" is more musical than "Joad," but not nearly as intense as "Nebraska." Those who embrace it must also be able to tolerate Springsteen's sometimes-affected drawl; he's a Jersey boy who at times tries to sound as if he were raised in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, circa 1933.

His fans will forgive him, however, because he again proves himself to be a master of the character study. He portrays a crooked boxer ("The Hitter"), a soldier in the Iraqi desert ("Devils and Dust"), a 12-year-old coping with his mother's death ("Silver Palomino"), and yet another immigrant looking for salvation ("Matamoros Banks") in songs rich with detail.

In this world, words are paramount, music a mere decoration. Producer Brendan O'Brien strives to complement the stories by making them prettier; he constructs rustic chamber pop out of a small rhythm section and stringed instruments. There's more than a hint of country twang, as befits songs largely situated in the Southwest. Springsteen's voice and acoustic guitar shoulder the primary weight. His melodies are careful and stately, and never rise to a fist-pumping crescendo.

Springsteen has made an album almost impossible not to respect. But it lacks the haunting intensity of his best ballads, from "The River" to "Philadelphia." That's because Springsteen's stories frequently trump his music; "Black Cowboys" hovers rather than moves, its tale of boyhood innocence lost shrouded in gray. "Silver Palomino" never quite gets off the couch as the pace winds down from slow to slower. Missing is the wired, claustrophobic tension that lingered just beneath the surface of the best songs on "Nebraska."

Part of the problem is that Springsteen doesn't trust his songs enough. He hands over the production to a professional who sugars the arrangements but doesn't improve them. At its best, "Devils and Dust" has a rawness that demands to be served cold. "Reno" qualifies as Springsteen's most explicit song ever; it describes a tryst between a hooker and a boozy drifter, and warrants an "adult imagery" warning sticker on the album cover. The story's a heartbreaking one, like the prelude to some cataclysmic reckoning in one of Jim Thompson's pulp novels, but it's swathed in strings that cushion the bleakness. Far better is the unadorned acoustic version included on the other side of this Dual Disc, a new technology that has a conventional CD on one side and a DVD on the other.

It's telling that the album's most powerful track, "The Hitter," is among its sparest. Springsteen's voice sounds natural, a doleful baritone that sketches in the bleak, brutal details of a stigmatized boxer's life; it could be the story of Morgan Freeman's noble has-been in Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby." Along with the five Springsteen acoustic performances on the DVD, it's a tantalizing glimpse of the stark, wrenching album the singer could've made had he decided not to gussy up the tunes.

[MK]

Rolling Stone's David Fricke gave his usual gutless review, the kind where he just sucks up to the artist just because they're a) very popular or b) a legend or c) already hyped. Metacritic has posted some, almost all of which are very positive, but they seem to be omitting the negative or mixed ones (except for a negative one from the Village Voice). Here's another mixed one, and I think I'd have to agree with this one the most.

Tuesday, Apr 26, 2005
CD Review: Bruce Springsteen's "Devils & Dust"
Thomas Bartlett, Audiofile/Salon.com

I imagine many listeners will be scandalized by "Reno," the third track on Bruce Springsteen's latest record, "Devils & Dust," on which he sings in jarringly explicit language of an encounter with a prostitute -- earning the singer the first "adult imagery" warning sticker of his three-decade career. Hearing the line "200 straight in, 250 up the ass, she smiled and said" from the lips of the Boss is sure to at least raise some eyebrows. Personally, I'm a good deal more scandalized by the wobbly falsetto he attempts on "All I'm Thinkin' About." It could, I suppose, have worked as a subversive undermining of the air of wholesome masculinity he has embodied with such consistency. Instead, it comes across as a very poor aesthetic decision by an artist who should, by now, know his strengths and avoid his weaknesses.

With "Devils & Dust," Springsteen has once again moved away from the engineered-for-transcendence redemption rock he returned to for "The Rising," and he has once again dispensed with the E Street Band, playing most of the instruments on the record himself. The solo acoustic guitar at the opening might lead you to think that Springsteen was revisiting the spare, bleak world of "Nebraska" and "The Ghost of Tom Joad." You'd be half right, but he's actually trudged into an uncomfortable, somewhat soggy middle ground, muddying the simply structured, folky songs with stray bits of cheesy '80s production, and weakly leavening the bleakness with occasional halfhearted attempts at uplift. For all its thematic unity, focusing, in Springsteen's words, on people "in some spiritual struggle between the worst of themselves and the best of themselves," the record feels oddly wishy-washy, unfocused and wayward.

Then there's the Dylan problem. Whether it's a conscious decision or just the natural evolution of an aging voice, Springsteen's rasping, nasal singing on this record often comes off as straight-up mimicry of Dylan. And the comparison is not flattering. In the realm of arena-ready, fist-pumping, roughly bombastic rock, Springsteen has few peers, but put him head to head with Dylan in the category of wordy, acoustic songs and he comes across as trite, sentimental and reflexively, simplistically rugged.

None of this is to say that "Devils & Dust" is a bad record. Springsteen's level of craft remains consistently high, and although there aren't many hummable melodies here, the songs are beautifully shaped and phrased. Most of all, the Boss remains a powerfully charismatic musical presence, carrying even mediocre material to success on the sheer force of his personality. This is far from a classic, but it's also hard not to enjoy.

[13:15 EDT, April 26, 2005]