Bruce Springsteen: Devils & Dust

Herald rating: * * *

The trouble with being Bruce Springsteen - and he has brought it on himself - is that every time he releases an album it gets treated like a state of the union address.

It's hard to be the Boss and just release a bunch of songs. He's inevitably treated as the rock philosopher-by-appointment to middle America.

Sometimes he's up to the job. Though his solid last album, the E Street Band-reuniting post September 11 The Rising might have sold better had it been the patriotic chest-beater many critics mistakenly thought it was. But it fell short of being the sequel to Born in the USA.

The E Street band aren't around for this one. And the lone-Springsteen approach already has some saying this is a return to the storytelling starkness of Nebraska or the Ghost of Tom Joad.

Well, it sure tells some stories. It has soldiers, boxers, cowboys, inner-city kids, orphans and troubled family men stretching from Iraq to to biblical Jerusalem to seedy Nevada and down Mexico way.

And some of them are doing stuff you never thought happened in Springsteen songs - like the sexually frank encounter between the immigrant worker and the prostitute in Reno which has already caused a bit of a stir stateside.

While there is many an engaging anecdote or character study among the dozen tracks here, they don't add up to much of a compendium in the way the likes of Tom Joad or The Rising did.

The best stories make for the best songs. The title track about a soldier fearing for his life in Iraq is vivid as it rumbles forth at the album's beginning, while The Hitter and Black Cowboys are Springsteen at his most Bob Dylan-like.

But there's not a lot of colour to the sound - with now-regular producer Brendan O'Brien, it's Springsteen and a mix of sort-of-solo-acoustic, sort-of-band arrangements with occasional lavish coatings of organs, strings and backing singers.

Sometimes the supposedly cinematic mood it's trying to achieve can be self-defeating with Springsteen's voice lost in in the mix. There's further proof that some of the solo acoustic live takes on the accompanying DVD are more convincing than the studio versions. Though some twang'n'grit does still shine through - at best on the infectious Ben Harper-ish slide-blues of All I'm Thinking About.

What Springsteen is thinking about, though, isn't clear on this uneven set - it's a moderately engaging in-betweener of an album delivering few surprises, aside from that dubious Reno.

It's just a bunch of Boss-songs - some good some mediocre - on an album that isn't his best work but which shows he still knows how to sing a good yarn when so inspired.

Label: Columbia