The Boss leaves me at a loss

HIGH HOPES is Bruce Springsteen’s 18th studio album but i t ’ s not e nt i r e l y new. In fact, it comprises songs he’s been playing for 10 years or so, making the dozen tracks here essentially outtakes from his 21st century output — 2002’s The Rising, 2007’s Magic and 2009’s Working On A Dream. What Springsteen has done is re-record them with producer Ron Aniello and sequence them, with the intention that the results should resemble a proper standalone album rather than a compilation of odds and sods.

In the liner notes, Springsteen describes the music performed here with his trusty E Street Band (minus late sax behemoth Clarence Clemons) as “some of our best unreleased material from the past decade”. But, truth is, it is a bit of a hodge-podge, including cover versions, re-works, tracks from the vaults as well as previously unheard numbers. Springsteen has never been about tapping into the musical zeitgeist, but even by his standards these songs sound dated. The arrangements are cluttered, sonically excessive but not adventurous, just gimmicky.

Beneath the din, it’s often hard to discern the quality of the songwriting. What comes through is generic, plodding Bruce-rock. High Hopes features that distinctive gruff voice, blue collar goodness seeping from every sweaty, gritty pore as the Boss sides, as ever, with the underdog (“Don’t you know that these days you pay for everything”). Harry’s Place is ’80s rock with a bar-room R&B-funk tinge. It is all setting and no story, like an Elmore Leonard novel where nothing happens. The lyrics and music are mired in cliches from the artist’s own back pages. Just Like Fire Would is bog-standard organfuelled rock that could have come out at any time in the last 40 years, the details (“One night in a motel room… I drank the wine that had been left on my table… I smoked my last cigarette”) so trite they verge on self-parody.

American Skin (41 Shots) was written in the wake of the US police shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999, but rather than a universal howl of rage at injustice, it is like listening to a faded old news story. Of course, Springsteen’s metier was never musical radicalism. It was his ability to empathise with the working man and he does that throughout this album, notably on Down In The Hole, although whether the multimillionaire rock star has been down any hole, even a metaphorical one, in the past four decades is arguable. Some will enjoy this clinging to traditional virtues. Others will see it as intransigence.

Springsteen’s conservatism comes across clearest, ironically, on his cover of Dream Baby Dream by pioneering electronic duo Suicide. Aesthetically they couldn’t be further apart — the positivist blue-collar New Jersey rocker and the nihilistic avant-garde New York Jews. In his clumsy hands, this edgy synth elegy becomes a rockin’ rallying cry, a rabble-rouser, a rebel anthem. Talk about missing the point.