The only hate I hear on this LP is embodied in a single song, “Streets of Fire,” where Springsteen describes how it feels to be trapped by lies.
#DARKNESS ALBUM REVIEW FULL#
There are those who will say that “Adam Raised a Cain” is full of hate, but I don’t believe it. And in “Adam Raised a Cain,” the son who rejected his father’s world comes to understand their relationship as “the dark heart of a dream” - a dream become nightmarish, but a vision of something better nonetheless.
In the song’s final verse, he describes with genuine love a person of the first sort, someone whose eyes “hate for just being born.” In “Factory,” he depicts the most numbing sort of life with a compassion that’s nearly religious. In “Racing in the Street,” the album’s most beautiful ballad, Springsteen separates humanity into two classes: “Some guys they just give up living/And start dying little by little, piece by piece/Some guys come home from work and wash up/And go racin’ in the street.” But there’s nothing smug about it, because Springsteen knows that the line separating the living dead from the walking wounded is a fine and bitter one. Springsteen also realizes the terrible price one pays for living at half-speed. There isn’t a single song on this record in which his yearning for a perfect existence, a live lived to the hilt, doesn’t play a central role. Bruce Springsteen says this over and over again, more bluntly and clearly than anyone could have imagined. Despite its title, it is a complete rejection of despair. In a way, this album might take as its text two lines from Jackson Browne: “Nothing survives - /But the way we live our lives.” But where Browne is content to know this, Springsteen explores it: Darkness on the Edge of Town is about the kind of life that deserves survival. But all of these elements - the production, the playing, even the programming - are designed to focus our attention on what Springsteen has to tell us about the last three years of his life. Ideas, characters and phrases jump from song to song like threads in a tapestry, and everything’s one long interrelationship. The programming alone is impressive: each side is a discrete progression of similar lyrical and musical themes, and the whole is a more universal version of the same picture. One could say a great deal about the construction of this LP. It’s the possibility hinted at on Born to Run’s “Backstreets” and in the postverbal wail at the end of “Jungleland,” In fact, Springsteen picks up that moan at the beginning of “Something in the Night,” on which he turns in the new album’s most adventurous vocal. But more than ever, Springsteen’s voice is personal, intimate and revealing, bigger and less elusive.
Certainly, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan are the inspirations for taking such extreme chances: bending and twisting syllables making two key lines on “Streets of Fire” a wordless, throttled scream the wailing and humming that precede and follow some of the record’s most important lyrics. Much the same can be said about Springsteen’s singing. In the end the most impressive guitar work of all is just his own: “Adam Raised a Cain” and “Streets of Fire” are things no one‘s ever heard before. Sometimes Springsteen quotes a famous solo - Robbie Robertson’s from the live version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” at the end of “Something in the Night,” Jeff Beck’s from “Heart Full of Soul” in the bridge of “Candy’s Room” - and then shatters it into another dimension. There are echoes of a dozen influences - Duane Eddy, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Roy Buchanan, even Ennio Morricone’s Sergio Leone soundtracks - but the synthesis is completely Springsteen’s own. Like his songwriting and singing, Springsteen’s guitar playing gains much of its distinctiveness through pastiche. Yet the dominant instrumental focus of Darkness on the Edge of Town is Bruce Springsteen’s guitar. Federici’s style is utterly singular, focusing on wailing, trebly chords that sing (and in the marvelous solo at the end of “Racing in the Street,” truly cry). But the revelation is organist Danny Federici, who barely appeared on the last L.P. Pianist Roy Bittan is as virtuosic as on Born to Run, and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, though he has fewer solos, evokes more than ever the spirit of King Curtis. Weinberg, bassist Garry Tallent and guitarist Steve Van Zandt are a perfect rhythm section, capable of both power and groove. Now that it can be heard, the E Street Band is clearly one of the finest rock & roll groups ever assembled.
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