Bruce Springsteen Magic Review

http://gu.com/p/xjg88 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/sep/30/popandrock.springsteen

With itchy guitars still in vogue, these are not air-punching musical times. But anyone braving a festival this summer cannot have missed the Hold Steady, tourers of vintage rock. Lyrics apart, the Steady have been channelling the manly musicality of Springsteen's E Street Band - bold chords, honky-tonk pianos, rousing choruses and all, energetically priming old timers and neophytes alike for the return of classic Boss.
Magic is the record that many Springsteen fans have been waiting for since 2002's The Rising, the last time Springsteen and his faithful E Streeters plugged in together. It will be his most adored since the Eighties, when this anti-war liberal was the guitar hero of all America. The 18-wheeler roll of these muscular pop songs, meanwhile, harks back to Springsteen's Seventies Jersey Shore sound.
After last year's Seeger Sessions disc and tour of traditional folk songs, and 2005's subdued Devils and Dust, Magic is a record aimed squarely at radio, stadiums, open car windows and the solar plexus of guys who don't notice passing musical fashion. Magic sounds big. And it sounds great.
If you want to get a song played on the radio in America, lyrics including 'radio' and 'America' can't hurt and these are words that Springsteen's lead single 'Radio Nowhere' deploys quite purposefully. The unease in the lyrics is taken up by the urgency of the band, evidently overjoyed to be rocking out.
And so it continues: puissant rock songs, as tight as drumskins, carrying little fat but saturated with Clarence Clemons's sax, Sopranos star Steven Van Zandt's guitar and mandolin and Roy Bittan's piano and organ, not to mention a 15-strong string mob. 'Livin' in the Future' is a good-time bar-rocker that announces its arrival in a blare of brass.
Listen closely, though, and Springsteen is nursing a broken heart oozing with political allegory. His last E Street Band record, The Rising, dealt maturely with 9/11; on Magic his thoughts turn again and again to the current war ('Devil's Arcade') and the rift in American society that the body bags have brought about ('Gypsy Biker'). No one can lace musical triumphalism with mordant protest like Springsteen, whose 'Born in the USA' remains the exemplar of the genre.
Superbly balanced between the joy of a big rock sound and the troubles of the age, Magic is a saddened, pissed-off record, dancing to forget on a Saturday night, as the 'bodies' get 'stacked up outside the door'.
There are even more surprises. Magic may be a return to heartland Springsteen, but even this familiar landscape can remind you of other places. On 'Girls in Their Summer Clothes', Springsteen is a minor-key crooner, whose wry downturns sound remarkably like Stephin Merritt (who records as the Magnetic Fields), an indie singer songwriting minnow compared to Bruce.
The most pristine moment comes in the first verse of another, less political, love song. 'Pour me a drink Theresa/ From one of those glasses you dust off/ And I'll watch the bones in your back like the stations of the cross,' goes 'I'll Work for Your Love'.
In it, there is drinking, some redemption and the burn of traditional blue-collar Jersey Shore Catholicism. Indeed, these are Bruce key notes that echo in the songs of his cheerleaders, the Hold Steady. But no one can perform the marriage of sophistication and ordinariness or hymn everyday joys and tragedies with nuance quite like Bruce Springsteen.