Bruce Springsteen
The Promise

THE REVIEW

The Boss has long been scraping the bottom of the barrel. His good fortune is that the bottom never arrives, as every time he wishes to fill the market with some musical release without having a new album of original songs ready, he puts out a collection of tracks excluded from previous works, or a live album. In this 2010, he even played both cards with the live album "London Calling" and this "The Promise", which collects everything that couldn't make it into the marvelous "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" back in 1978. That was a more intimate and disillusioned album than its predecessors, especially when compared with the 1975 masterpiece "Born To Run", where youthful hopes and dreams reigned, only to find themselves drowning in the rough regrets of adulthood three years later, with which one eventually has to come to terms.

The most fascinating aspect of the artist that was Bruce Springsteen is surely that he hasn't composed albums by choosing from the vast range of songs he wrote the most radio-friendly ones, thus producing a jumble of catchy pieces to feed the charts, but instead those that gave the album a complete sense, those that were closer to what he wanted the spirit of the album to be. "Born In The U.S.A." managed to be both. This explains the exclusion from the '78 album of some excellent tracks that are being revived here, like "Because The Night" or "Fire" later donated to others but always remaining in the heart of the Boss: they weren't sufficiently coated with that disenchantment of a vanished dream, of a promised land discovered not to be his America, of that sense of emptiness that only hope stored away in a basement box can convey. As Springsteen himself stated, the songs contained in this "The Promise" should have been released between "Born To Run" and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town", and that's where they should be placed, forming a bridge between illusion and disillusion, they are certainly less dreamy but haven't given up yet. The title track, already known for appearing on the "18 Tracks" compilation in '99 in a different (and better) version, embodies the entire sense of the album and throws that bridge completely: "I followed that dream just like those guys do up on the screen, and I drive a Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes, and when the promise was broken I cashed in a few of my dreams" only to end by recalling that Thunder Road which, until just a few years before, meant escape, hope, a shake to sedentary life to not die in a bed of regrets; now, sadly, ends on a melancholic note: "Thunder Road, we were gonna take it all and throw it all away". And then? And then there's darkness on the edge of town.

This album is appreciated by those nostalgic for the storytelling Springsteen, the authentic, true, American uncle, and not the grotesque caricature of himself he's been proposing for a while now. The Boss's barrel is incredibly well-stocked, and what comes out of it certainly isn't up to the albums released in the golden days, but it is much superior to those published in recent, dark times.