It would be a gross understatement to say that anticipation for
The Rising
was high. Having previewed one of its songs -- "My City of Ruins," which appears here in radically reworked fashion -- on a post-September 11th benefit show, Springsteen made it clear that the album was going to be more than a mere collection of tunes, and he certainly delivers on that promise. For one thing, the album is the first in years to feature the entire E Street Band; in addition, the songs all reverberate with the events of September 11th. On the surface, those two elements would seem to go together like ham and ice cream, but in practice the mixture works stunningly well. On several songs, Bruce revisits the plainspoken blue-collar characters that often pop up in his oeuvre, but here, they face concrete crises, rather than existential ones: The stark "Into the Fire" tells the tale of a doomed rescue worker,
while the unsettled "Nothing Man" -- a song of brooding incantation and sharp release -- delves into the survivor's guilt of one who made it out alive. Springsteen departs from tried-and-true formulas on many of
The Rising's better songs: Techno beats creep into "The Fuse" (one of the disc's more positive numbers), while the voices of a South Indian choir waft above and around the melody of "Worlds Apart." The ghost of E Street bombast past rears up now and again -- notably on "Mary's Place," which sounds an awful lot like a dusted-off outtake from
The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle -- but
for the most part, the musicians show admirable restraint. That might be a result of producer Brendan O'Brien's careful mix, but more likely, it's the kind of maturity that can only come from a place that's dark, but not without hope. After all, a rising can only come after a fall.
![Title: Even Now [Bonus Track]](https://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0886979341623_p0_v2_s90x140.jpg)
