Springsteen promises, and really delivers

No more excuses this time about the long silence since my last post; well, actually, lots of excuses, mainly revolving around a lot of travel, including the States and Iowa and Nebraska, which provides a perfectly apt lead-in to my first musical comment of this post, without further ado!

Music

I don't have a large repository of location-appropriate musical anecdotes, so occasionally you just have to sieze the day and manufacture one, as I bemused two colleagues by playing 'Nebraska' by Springsteen at full blast from my iPhone as we crossed the Iowa-Nebraska border (no highway patrolmen to be seen, nor state troopers) on my great midwestern roadtrip (if a 3-hour drive from Ames, Iowa to Lincoln, Nebraska could be called that.  I must admit switching to Counting Crows as we passed on the highway by Omaha (and it was indeed somewhere in middle America) but then it was back to Bruce. 

This is actually quite appropriate for reasons other than geographical, as I have also been listening to 'The Promise', the reissue of extra tracks recorded (mostly) around the time of 'Darkness on the edge of town' (an album I already really liked in its own right).  Having read first in Uncut about the whole box set reissue (see image below right), I was interested to check that out, by a €100+ price tag tested my real love for Bruce, and found it slightly lacking in these economically constrained times, so I downloaded the extra tracks CD from iTunes instead.

Anyway, 'The promise' is just brilliant!  'Darkness' earned its name in mood, but 'The Promise' lives in the light, and is incredibly uplifting and melodic for the most part.  My 10-year-old opined that it sounded like Christmas music, and it actually almost does, in tone and spirit and chiminess (?), and shows where songs from recent albums I have loved like 'Your own worst enemy', 'Girls in their summer clothes' and 'Queen of the supermarket' got their DNA, except these newly excavated masterpieces were recorded over 30 years ago, by far younger men, and somehow that adds to the thrill for me.  Songs such as 'Gotta get that feeling', 'Outside looking in', 'Someday (we'll be together)' (these three in a wonderful row near the start), 'Save my love', 'Talk to me' and, in particular, 'The little things (my baby does)' are just pop perfection, and reveal a lightness of touch and mood that I just never associated with that era of Springsteen.  In fact, the ones I sort of knew are my least favourite ('Fire' and 'Because the night', the legendariness of the latter never having made an impact on me in others' hands).  However, 'Come on (let's go out tonight) (boy he was going throug a serious bracketed subtitle phase in the late 70s!) reworks (preworks?) one of my favourites from 'Darkness' ('Factory') very nicely, and I always love finding the musical antecedents of well known songs, where early drafts with different lyrics or twists appear on later compilations (I can think of great examples for the National ('Slow show') and the Jayhawks ('I'm gonna make you love me')).  Overall, a brilliant album, and well deserving of the comment I saw in one review that this truly is the great lost Springsteen album.

It was hard to find tracks from 'The promise' on Youtube, besides tracks uploaded to still photo or blank backgrounds, so I will just include a contemporaneous live clip of the great 'Racing in the streets':

In a very different musical direction, I also downloaded 'The best of Suede'; firstly, it has to be said that when a band that have perhaps 5 studio albums to their name release a 35-track compilation, they may just be taking the piss to suggest this is their best, as surely one would have expected modesty to demand a slightly more winnowing choice of crucial cuts?

However, having said all that, I must admit that most of these songs are actually pretty damned great, and this is overall a great survey of the output of a great band.  I also must admit that I had almost forgotten how good they and their songs were, and had tended to retrospectively dismiss all bar 'Dog man star', but there are really really good songs scattered through this huge tracklist, and they unquestionably had that strange mix of their air of jaded glamour and epic drama married to great rock sensibilities and very good musicianship down to a tee.

I have wittered on about 'Dog man star' before (here), so I will include here two tracks from their later period, and start with 'Everything must flow' from 'Head music' (which I remember being somewhat bemused to find the now defunct Melody Maker picking as their album of that particular year); it appears second in the below set from 'Jools Holland':



I lso like this acoustic studio version of 'Saturday night' from 'Coming up':



Not moving quite as far as from Springsteen to Suede, but backtracking alphabetically, beings me to The National, who have released an extended version of 'High violet' (about which I almost had a coronary here), which iTunes kindly allowed me to download the extra tracks as an EP (although two of them, 'Sin eaters' and 'Walk off'', had previously somewhat underwhelmed me as bonus tracks on the download first time around).  Anyway, I honestly don't see all that much difference in the versions of 'Terrible love' and may soon have a playlist of live versions of 'England' alone, but I do like the MTV-unplugged style acoustic countryish version of 'Bloodbuzz Ohio' and really like 'Wake up your saints'.  The latter, to me, recaptures the playful spirit and lush instrumentalisation of 'So far around the bend' from 'Dark was the night' in a way that no track on 'High violet' really did, and I am pretty sure I can remember them playing this live in the Olympia in Dublin back in 2008 (they certainly did a song about saints, and when I heard 'Tall saint' some time later I was sure that was not it).  I found a live capture of it here:



There are other things going on musically right now, as the pre-1 December embargo on Christmas music passes (time to joyously hit 'Come on let's boogie to the elf dance' by Sufjan Stevens, surely the greatest unknown Christmas song of all), and I go to see Arcade Fire plus Vampire Weekend in Dublin on 5 December (woo-hoo!).  In addition, the first 'best of'' CD list has appeared, as Q magazine becomes I am sure only the first of many to put 'The suburbs', as their number one (Robert Plant as their number two, and 'High violet' around number 10), and such lists will surely become an obsession in coming weeks as in previous years.

In non-musical business, there has been lots of technology as I have waited in foolish anticipation for IOS4.2 to re-energise my iPad (it did!) and for Apple TV to to the same to my TV (it also did - damn you Steve Jobs!), books (on subjects from Ireland's wasters to HIV denial to the Large Hadron Collider), and TV (box sets of The Office and Firefly being worked through, and The Walking Dead being much enjoyed), if not many movies (a guilty enjoyment of 'Daybreakers' the exception).

However, it, like this post, is now late, and I think I will end this post, long enough as it is, here, and come back (honestly) soon to pick up the above threads.

That is, if Ireland hasn't been sold off by the IMF for scrap and spare parts by then.

Strange and worrying times indeed.