Consumer Guide Album

Bruce Springsteen: Darkness on the Edge of Town [Columbia, 1978]
"Promised Land," "Badlands," and "Adam Raised a Cain" are models of how an unsophisticated genre can illuminate a mature, full-bodied philosophical insight. Lyrically and vocally, they move from casual to incantatory modes with breathtaking subtlety, jolting ordinary details into meaning. But many of the other songs remain local-color pieces, and at least two--"Something in the Night" and "Streets of Fire"--are overwrought, soggy, all but unlistenable. An important minor artist or a rather flawed and inconsistent major one. B+