BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - The Rising

"The Rising" marks the long-awaited return of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The contribution of the most explosive rock'n'roll band of the last 30 years is uneven, there's more Springsteen here, his voice no longer screams throughout the record, now he manages to keep it in check, but the whole thing, I must say, surprisingly, sounds and sounds great. The album is steeped in memories and flashes of the September 11 disaster, everything seems to constantly evoke and recall that day, the stories, even the love stories, are set against a backdrop of plumes of smoke rising towards the sky on the horizon, a day that changed the lives of many but above all, it seems, the Boss's own.

The opening promises well, "Lonesome Day" seems to have the right charge, its impact recalls "The Ties That Bind"... not bad. "Into the Fire" belongs to the "new compositional vein" (see "Tunnel of Love") but it works. Here and there, as in "Waitin' on a Sunny Day", the reverberations of past splendor begin to emerge, and above all The Big Man returns to let us taste his sax, in the company of an unexpected but most welcome violin. The new melodic vein materializes in a "Nothing Man" that's neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy and is quickly forgotten thanks to the great "Countin' on a Miracle", a healthy bearer of that sound we hold dear and complete with a brief guitar solo. "Empty Sky" plays on a lovely chord progression of acoustic guitars, sober and tasty, with a welcome return: the harmonica. Something new in the sound can be felt in the opening of "Worlds Apart", which hopes for a coming together of distant worlds, the Islamic and the American, through love: a great song, a great guitar solo.

The production is excellent, the sounds are beautiful, the arrangements, the choruses and the song constructions are lovely, as in the delightful "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)", where the warm sound of Big Man's sax returns. We find familiar sounds again in "Further on Up the Road", a tasty rock song that sees the triumph of Max Weinberg and Danny Federici, but above all of their old-time brilliance. Springsteen can still draw blood, as in "The Fuse", an intense and evocative ballad (9/11 docet), by far the best track on the album. "You're Missing" doesn't add anything, but it's listenable, while the mournful notes arrive with the single "The Rising", an average song, born to be a single, to put it in Bruce's own terms... born to sale! "Paradise", on the other hand, is the song that will spark the most debate: it tells of a terrorist's state of mind before an attack, not a condemnation but a Ludlum-style narrative that leaves many avenues of interpretation open, slow, meditative and engaging. The album closes with "My City of Ruins", a track Springsteen had kept in a drawer for some time and which he surprisingly pulled out after the Twin Towers, and which has now found, not by chance, its rightful place at the end of the album. A track that still smells of the '70s.

Given the importance of the lyrics, Columbia wisely included in the Italian edition the booklet with the translations, thanks to which one can truly fully immerse oneself in this album, which, in the end, turns out to be well balanced: there's a bit of old and a touch of new, in a good musical balance that could make "The Rising" the album of Springsteen's rebirth. A record that tells of the United States, placing September 11 as an indelible moment in the collective memory. The whole album seems wrapped in the smoke of that day but it is not self-pitying and, above all, it neither accuses nor absolves anyone, it simply acknowledges a state of affairs from which we all must move forward and rise again.

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07/11/2006