Howling At The Moon - The Punk Panther's Album Reviews

"Very rock 'n' roll ... with unexpected textures—loops, electronic percussion and an amazing sweep of influences and rhythms, from hip-hop to Irish folk rhythms" - The Hollywood Reporter   Another somewhat perplexing album,   after some patchy output in the first decade of the new millennium, Bruce Springsteen was back, this time railing at big finance, bankers and corporate business. Many would say this was somewhat hypocritical from a multi-millionaire, but Springsteen’s heart has always been in the right place. His targets were/are definitely deserving of it.  This is not an E Street Band album, some of the members, like Garry Tallent and Nils Lofgren do not appear at all. Others appear randomly on just a few tracks. Springsteen employs a large brass section, and the album is a sort of bridging point between the folky brass oompah of The Seeger Sessions and the guitar-driven rock of the last three albums. There are other styl...

"The thing with Bruce is that he accepts his inspiration without question, he doesn't analyze it. But when it comes time to analyze, that's when he turns the screws on everything. Then he'll go back and forth with sequences for months and months until he gets it exactly where he wants it. I don't see that in any other artist that I work with. It's usually like, 'What's a good sequence?' And then, 'Oh, the hit sounds good first. Then the bad songs should go at the end.' That's not how Bruce does it. He has a story to tell. We recorded a lot and at first it was a much longer record. Bruce did the same thing with 'Wrecking Ball'. I have the piece of paper with all 15 or whatever songs on it, and he draws a line through the last four and goes, 'This is it. Let's take these four off.' It was like a knife in my heart. I was like, 'Those are my favourites!' At the end of the day, though, he's always right. It...

"It is a return to my solo recordings featuring character-driven songs and sweeping, cinematic orchestral arrangements, a range of American themes, of highways and desert spaces, of isolation and community and the permanence of home and hope" - Bruce Springsteen   I have a strange relationship with Bruce Springsteen these days.   From those heady days of hero-worship of 1977 to 1984 we’ve both come a long hard way down that little dirt track that has a sign out front sayin’  “Thunder Road” .  I guess the bad seeds got sown, Sir, when the  Born In The USA  album came out and he was no longer a comparative “cult” artist that only a relatively small percentage of people in the mainstream really knew about. That album suddenly sat alongside  Thriller ,  Brothers in Arms  and the latest  Phil Collins  offering on the same people’s sparse record shelves. Maybe it all started to drift away a little then, down through those dead e...

    For such a legendary band, Bruce Springsteen and The E St. Band (in full attendance) have put out surprisingly few albums and they have often (especially in latter years) been blighted by poor production.  Here, thankfully, that is not the case as seventy-something Springsteen joyously leads his seventy-something mates down a little dirt track that has a sign out front sayin’ thunder road to resurrect some ghosts from the past.  This is not a seaside bar/mean streets Born To Run Bruce album, though, nor a bleak Darkness On The Edge of Town. Its spirit is to be found back in the wordy glory of 1973 (due to the presence of three made-over previously rejected songs), in 1979-80’s The River sessions and in 2008’s Magic.  It is an album respectfully lodged in the past and I love it for that - no dabbling in tape loops, ‘beats’ or rap vocal sections, just music that harks back to a more innocent time. Nobody is better qualified to deliver this sort of thing than a...

  So, what do artists do when they've pretty much done everything else? An album of cover versions, that's what. However, there are cover versions and there are cover versions. Some artists - I'm thinking of Rod Stewart with his Soul Book album in particular - go down the route of covering well-known standards, often not matching up to the timeless brilliance of the originals. Others - like the Rolling Stones with Blue & Lonesome - choose more obscure (to some) material. Bruce Springsteen has done the latter here with many of the tracks. He has also decided to cover soul numbers, which is a bit of a surprise, given that his roots are more in rock 'n' roll. Bryan Ferry did the same on some of the numbers on his 1973 These Foolish Things album. Some are not happy with an album of covers, though, wanting an album of new originals, but I am more open-minded about this project. Fair play to him, I say.   Regarding cover versions in general, over the years some of the...

  First, a brief diversion - a little intro to "me 'n' Bruce" - On Friday September 29, 1978, aged nineteen, I went round to my friend's parents' house. We were going to see UK reggae band Steel Pulse at Friars Club in Aylesbury. Getting ready in his bedroom, he said that before we went out I should listen to his latest reason for enthusiasm. Expecting some roots reggae or angry punk, I did as I was told and sat down, shut up and listened.  The track he played me was Thunder Road. He handed me the now-iconic white gatefold sleeve in order to read the lyrics. He was right to have sat me down, knowing the impact this song would have. It is corny and indulgent to say that it "changed my life", but certainly it kicked off an obsession with Springsteen and his music that lasted for the next fifteen years or so, before I started to view him a bit more objectively.  Since then I went on to see him him eighteen times in concert, including being in the fifth ...