October 9, 2007

Bruce Springsteen: 'Magic'

'Iraq’n’roll is what keeps him awake at night'

6 / 10 While The Killers may have nicked his trademark Big Sound and tales of busting out of this ole town for their second album, the return of the real Boss finds him running at 100mph in the other direction (down a lonely, dusty road, naturally). Even when he wrote an entire album about 9/11, Bruce somehow still managed to sound toe-tapping (and only he is still legally allowed to even use that phrase). Six years on he sounds like a man not getting nearly enough cuddles: “We don’t measure the blood we’ve drawn anymore/We just stack the bodies at the door”, he broods on ‘Last To Die’. In fact an overwhelming sense of mortality is everywhere here. But scratch the surface and it seems like Iraq’n’roll is what keeps him awake at night, as crystallised by closer ‘The Devil’s Arcade’: the desolate croak of a de-limbed soldier mouldering away in a hospital ward.

Gavin Haynes

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