'Magic,' the dark art

Posted on Sun, Sep. 30, 2007

Bruce Springsteen and the E Streeters rock out once more, conjuring sober truths while pretending to party.

By Dan DeLuca

Philadelphia Inquirer Music Critic

If you show a little faith, what's that you're supposed to find in the night?
Oh, yeah: Magic.

That's also the name of Bruce Springsteen's new album, which comes out Tuesday and finds him once again working with his trusted associates in the E Street Band, with whom he'll play sold-out shows Friday and Saturday at the Wachovia Center.

But the magic on Springsteen's 15th studio album isn't runaway redemption waiting at the end of Thunder Road. It's something more suspicious, and sinister, looming out there in the shadows. This Magic (Sony *** out of four stars) has tricks up its sleeve.

For starters, it pretends to be a party record. This is an old Springsteen ruse, dating to Born in the U.S.A. in 1984, and earlier death-haunted rave-ups like "Cadillac Ranch." Crank up the E Streeters, give an arena full of Bruce fans a rollicking workout to pump their fists to, and slip in the hard, cold truths while their guard is down.

On Magic, Springsteen gets right to it with the album's first single, "Radio Nowhere." It's not the Boss at his most stellar. The riff is borderline generic - it sounds kind of like Tommy Tutone's "867-5309." The lyrics are boilerplate by Springsteen standards, about searching for connections in a soulless world. "Is there anybody alive out there?" the Boss wants to know. And Brendan O'Brien's thick, meaty production is overly dense, a problem that mars the early sections of the record.

Guilt-ridden Springsteen fans should know, however, that Magic sounds brighter on CD than it did on the MP3 version that was leaked on the Internet this month. If that leak was indeed intentional, it succeeded in virally spreading the word conveyed in "Radio Nowhere" when Springsteen shouts out: "I want a thousand guitars / I want pounding drums / I want a million different voices speaking in tongues."

Namely, that Magic - following the double shot of folk with Devils & Dust (2005) and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006) - is a rock album, and a good one.

Once "Radio Nowhere" is out of the way, things improve dramatically, with the big, boomy "You'll Be Comin' Down," one in a series of songs featuring a "blow, Big Man, blow!" Clarence Clemons sax solo and an all-E Streeters-on-deck wall of sound.

That one will be sure to get Springsteen's middle-aged fans out of their seats at the Wachovia, but it's a song about schadenfreude, a warning-shot reminder that nobody stays on top forever, be it a cocky rock star or a full-of-himself politician: "Like a thief on a Sunday morning, it all falls apart with no warning."

The song that follows, "Livin' in the Future," struts with "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" swagger, and it's the catchiest tune that Springsteen has released in years. But if you listen closely, you notice that the future "that hasn't happened yet" is full of doom and doubt. And when the singer "woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of gray," his "faith's been torn asunder, tell me is that rollin' thunder?"

That's what makes Magic, at its best, work so well. It delivers the up-tempo good times, and is full of conscious connections to Springsteen's past work. The pair of captivating, Beach Boys-influenced songs, "Your Own Worst Enemy" and "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," are evocative of the '70s lost nuggets on the Tracks box set. And the loose-limbed "Gypsy Biker" stretches out almost as if it were pulled from the early '70s, before Born to Run. (Sometimes, the connections are too obvious, as in the "Jungleland"-style piano intro that's pasted onto "I'll Work for Your Love.")

But if Magic is the Springsteen record most suited for radio play since, maybe, Tunnel of Love, 20 years ago, it's also one that reveals layers of meaning on the lyric sheet.

As a public figure, Springsteen has grown more outspoken in his politics over his career. On the surface, Magic might seem to be a retreat from the partisan stance he took with the Vote for Change tour in 2004 and Blind Alfred Reed's 1929 song "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live," which he retooled as a Hurricane Katrina protest song on the Seeger Sessions tour.

While any Bruce fan can feel free to blithely tap a toe and sing along, Magic is about a world rife with trouble, where there's danger in whistling in the dark. The language gets overt only on "Last to Die," in which the 58-year-old Springsteen - whose vocals throughout are impressively full-bodied and free of the affected twang of his folkier efforts - sings in the bridge "The wise men were all fools / What to do," and asks, "Who will be the last to die for a mistake?"

It's unclear whether the mistake he's singing about is the war in Vietnam or Iraq. The same is true of "Gypsy Biker," whose traveler comes home in a casket, and whose narrator doesn't take sides ("To the dead it don't matter much, 'bout who's wrong or right") before setting his friend's motorcycle on fire.

Magic is about trying to find a solid place to stand when you can't trust your leaders or even yourself. The bad guy in "Your Own Worst Enemy" is the narrator himself, who looks in a shop window and - like the guy in "Dancing in the Dark" - doesn't like what he sees. In "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," one of several songs to make good use of Soozie Tyrell's violin, a lovelorn guy is alienated "down here on magic street," watching the parade of life go by.

Two-thirds of the way through, the album shifts gears. The jaunty tone disappears, as if it was too much of a facade to be sustained all the way through. The acoustic title cut makes it clear that the magic we're talking about here is not David Copperfield shenanigans.

"I'll cut you in half, while you're smiling ear to ear," Springsteen whispers, each verse more quietly menacing and mysterious than the last, ending with the promise that deceit and trickery will win out - "This is what will be."

Magic doesn't tail off without fighting to find some reason to believe. The stately "The Long Walk Home" is about lost innocence and worse, a sense of who you are. But the slow-building music affirms the belief that maybe - with a touch of the grim resolution that can be seen on Springsteen's grizzled face on the album cover - the journey back can be completed.

The album ends with the bonus track "Terry's Song," an acoustic, heartfelt and winning tribute to Terry Magovern, a longtime Springsteen friend who died July 30. It's loose and touching and affectionate.

But before that, the official close comes with "Devil's Arcade," which evokes the Springsteen-influenced Canadian band Arcade Fire in more than just name. It's a haunted story song told, it seems, from the point of view of the female lover of a wounded soldier.

It's not sunny fare by any means, but a finely wrought, gently rousing, gorgeous song that builds an array of everyday details - "A breakfast to make, a bed draped in sunshine, a body that waits" - that add up to "something like faith." On Magic, that faith won't take you anyplace that's magical, but it might take you to someplace that's real.


To hear samples of Bruce Springsteen's album "Magic," go to http://go.philly.com/albums

Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "In the Mix," at http://go.philly.com/inthemix.