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Post by kds on Jun 30, 2023 16:16:32 GMT
I'm also landing on a seven. Good sounding album. I've listened to it probably a total of six or seven times, and I enjoy it each time. But....I struggle to really remember any of it when the album's done playing. It's one of those type of albums for me.
I think it's the kind of album that, if I really sat down and forced myself to listen to it, it would probably grow on me more (kind of like Maiden's last two albums), but I doubt it would ever achieve an 8 or higher.
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Post by B.E. on Jul 1, 2023 19:16:02 GMT
Catch-up comments on High Hopes:
This was the last Bruce album that I purchased upon release, but unlike Wrecking Ball I don't remember ever getting around to listening to it! I think the idea that it was more of a collection of outtakes than a proper studio album lessened my enthusiasm, but that really wasn't fair. Being entirely rerecorded legitimizes it in my mind, and from a production standpoint it feels like a singular work. After reading your comments about Tom's prominence on the album, I was actually expecting more than what was there. I sort of felt like there were only a handful of tracks where he was particularly prominent, and two of them ("High Hopes" and "Heaven's Wall") happen to be two of my favorites. Granted, I'm sure part of it is just being more of a fan of his, and I could pick him out of a decent amount of tracks, but I didn't get the impression that he was overly prominent or anywhere near to equal billing with Bruce.
Anyway, "High Hopes" really impressed me. That might be one of my favorite 21st century Bruce tracks. (I still haven't gotten around to listening to the version from the mid 90s yet.) I also really liked "Heaven's Wall", "Frankie Fell In Love", and "This Is Your Sword". I also thought Bruce uncannily channeled his The River persona on "Just Like Fire Would". "The Ghost of Tom Joad" is actually pretty good, too, but ideally they'd just end it around the 4-5 minute mark and not go into the 2nd guitar solo where Tom goes full-on RATM mode. That clashes stylistically, but it's also just a matter of being way too long of a track at that point. I really like the "it ain't no secret" hook in "American Skin". And "Harry's Place" is a pretty good track, too. To me, there's really only one weak/bad track: "Down in the Hole". The whole time I was waiting for it to transition into something good but it never happens. That's a skip track. Otherwise, I find the album very listenable. I was pleasantly surprised, overall. Fortunately, I didn't find some of the modern production choices (loops, etc) as being too jarring or off-putting. For the most part, they're very much in the background. Bruce's voice, though, is front and center and I thought he sounded better than he had on his two previous albums. That was another pleasant surprise. (And the trend more than continued on Western Stars.)
As I posted previously, I gave it a 7.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 2, 2023 11:36:31 GMT
Another rare unanimous vote: three voters rated Springsteen's Letter To You a 7, resulting in an average of ... 7.0.
We'll move on to our final installment in the series shortly.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 2, 2023 12:11:22 GMT
Bruce Springsteen, Only the Strong Survive (2022)
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were unable to tour their 2020 album Letter to You. Keeping busy, Springsteen, producer Ron Aniello, and an engineer--dubbing themselves The Night Shift--began assembling at his New Jersey home studio to lay down basic tracks of cover songs. And lay down tracks they did, reportedly for 55 songs for what was becoming an album of soul covers.
Springsteen and especially Aniello performed all the basic tracks. The former was surprisingly absent in the final recordings other than as a lead vocalist: a couple of songs on keyboards, a few on guitar, that's it. Aniello, on the other hand, played drums, bass, and guitar on all songs as well as vibes, piano, organ, glockenspiel, keyboards, and percussion. As they winnowed down the album to a batch of 15 songs, they considered naming the album Nightshift and Soul Days, the third and second songs on the eventual release, respectively, before coming up with a great title ... for a song they hadn't recorded yet. So they laid down "Only the Strong Survive," and had their album title.
Once the basic tracks were done, strings, horns, and backing vocals were overdubbed separately from the Power Station studio in New York City. Soul legend Sam Moore overdubbed vocals on two songs from his location in Florida.
The album had solid but unspectacular reviews, but underperformed relative to typical Springsteen albums. It peaked at #8 in the Billboard charts and did not even go silver in the U.S. It went silver and reached #2 in the U.K. This was the worst chart performance for a new Springsteen album since The Ghost of Tom Joad peaked at #11 in 1995.
Despite its mediocre performance, Springsteen apparently will pursue the same path in the near-term: the album was technically called Covers Vol. 1: Only the Strong Survive, and sure enough, former E Street Band keyboardist David Sancious said earlier in 2023 that he had performed on 18 songs intended for Vol. 2 and expected to tour the music in 2024. (It is not clear whether these 18 were taken from among the 55 songs originally recorded for the initial album.)
Please listen to, discuss, and rate Bruce Springsteen's Only the Strong Survive.
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Post by kds on Jul 3, 2023 14:50:38 GMT
This is my first time listening to Only the Strong Survive. It didn't really pique my interest upon its release as an album of an aging Springsteen covering soul songs interested me about as much as an again Brian Wilson singing songs from Disney movies.
One thing that's very surprising to me about this Bruce album. It sounds very sterile to me. There's no "soul" in these soul covers at all IMO.
Now, I think had Bruce and the E Street Band did an album of soul covers, maybe you'd have something. But, this to me just sounds like a pointless exercise. Even Bruce sounds bored with it at times.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 3, 2023 15:00:55 GMT
I gave Only the Strong Survive my first ever listen. I'd heard a few songs from it as they were released, but never the whole album (or even close to it).
This will be a tough one for me to rate, because I think it's pretty good, but it's also just not my thing in a few different ways.
One, I am not really a fan of cover albums. Sure, I do love me some covers here and there, but off the top of my head I can't think of a single pop or rock album comprising exclusively covers that I really like, much less love.
And two, soul music isn't really my thing. It's not that I dislike it, but it's not a go-to. I think it has to be certain artists, or I have to be in the right mood for it.
For me, then, the album was on first listen more about appreciation than enjoyment.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 3, 2023 15:03:41 GMT
One thing that's very surprising to me about this Bruce album. It sounds very sterile to me. There's no "soul" in these soul covers at all IMO. Now, I think had Bruce and the E Street Band did an album of soul covers, maybe you'd have something. But, this to me just sounds like a pointless exercise. Even Bruce sounds bored with it at times. I thought some of the singing was really good, but I actually mostly agree. And I think it's possible to make an educated guess as to why: most of the rock instrumentation was done by one person, the producer Ron Aniello (with a little bit of guitar and keys from Bruce, and then the strings and horns overdubbed later). For this kind of music, I think live performance is often a big piece of it. And the ebb and flow, the swing, those kinds of things are best accomplished by the strain of a group of different people playing together. I wonder how it would have sounded had it been recorded not just by the E Street Band, but by the E Street band in the same way they did Letter to You, which is to say, live in the same room at the same time. (Granted, there was a pandemic involved here that presumably made it harder to actually do that...)
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Post by kds on Jul 3, 2023 15:14:14 GMT
One thing that's very surprising to me about this Bruce album. It sounds very sterile to me. There's no "soul" in these soul covers at all IMO. Now, I think had Bruce and the E Street Band did an album of soul covers, maybe you'd have something. But, this to me just sounds like a pointless exercise. Even Bruce sounds bored with it at times. I thought some of the singing was really good, but I actually mostly agree. And I think it's possible to make an educated guess as to why: most of the rock instrumentation was done by one person, the producer Ron Aniello (with a little bit of guitar and keys from Bruce, and then the strings and horns overdubbed later). For this kind of music, I think live performance is often a big piece of it. And the ebb and flow, the swing, those kinds of things are best accomplished by the strain of a group of different people playing together. I wonder how it would have sounded had it been recorded not just by the E Street Band, but by the E Street band in the same way they did Letter to You, which is to say, live in the same room at the same time. (Granted, there was a pandemic involved here that presumably made it harder to actually do that...) And I think the E St Band would knock this kind of music out of the park. So, going through Bruce's entire catalog, I'm even more tied to my opinion that Bruce is far better with the ESB than without.
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Post by B.E. on Jul 3, 2023 15:30:35 GMT
So, going through Bruce's entire catalog, I'm even more tied to my opinion that Bruce is far better with the ESB than without. I've actually had the opposite experience: it's reinforced that I'm more of a Bruce fan than an ESB fan.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 3, 2023 15:31:46 GMT
So, going through Bruce's entire catalog, I'm even more tied to my opinion that Bruce is far better with the ESB than without. I've actually had the opposite experience: it's reinforced that I'm more of a Bruce fan than an ESB fan. And I was thinking I'll have to list them side by side and really think about it. There are some of each I like quite a bit, and some of each I'm not so high on!
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Post by B.E. on Jul 3, 2023 15:41:39 GMT
I can say this: Ron Aniello is my least favorite producer for Springsteen to date to this point in his catalog. Kapitan, forgive me if you commented more on this subsequently and I haven't read it yet, but you said this^ about Ron Aniello after reviewing his first two albums with Bruce, Wrecking Ball and High Hopes. But Ron then produced Western Stars which you mentioned might be Bruce's best sounding album since Born to Run. Then he produced Letter to You and Only the Strong Survive. So, I guess I just wonder what you think about him now? I still have more listening and commenting to do on a few of these albums, but it's sort of interesting how different some of these albums are. I did notice an improvement in Bruce's vocals with High Hopes and, especially, with Western Stars. I thought there was a slight decline with Letter to You but that it was still very good for his age. And the one track I've heard so far on Only the Strong Survive, I thought he sounded great.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 3, 2023 15:55:07 GMT
I can say this: Ron Aniello is my least favorite producer for Springsteen to date to this point in his catalog. Kapitan, forgive me if you commented more on this subsequently and I haven't read it yet, but you said this^ about Ron Aniello after reviewing his first two albums with Bruce, Wrecking Ball and High Hopes. But Ron then produced Western Stars which you mentioned might be Bruce's best sounding album since Born to Run. Then he produced Letter to You and Only the Strong Survive. So, I guess I just wonder what you think about him now? I still have more listening and commenting to do on a few of these albums, but it's sort of interesting how different some of these albums are. I did notice an improvement in Bruce's vocals with High Hopes and, especially, with Western Stars. I thought there was a slight decline with Letter to You but that it was still very good for his age. And the one track I've heard so far on Only the Strong Survive, I thought he sounded great. I don't know if I ever did comment again specifically on Aniello's production--at least not in terms of how I'd rate it overall--but I can now say it's a decidedly mixed bag. Those first couple albums, I stand behind my initial assessment. But the next two sound fantastic to me, as different from one another as they are. As for Only the Strong Survive, it falls in the middle. I appreciate the more organic sounds and I think Bruce's performance are pretty strong, but as I was saying earlier today, I think the music suffers from the one-man-band overdubbing approach. Where does that put him overall? I guess both near the top and near the bottom!
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Post by B.E. on Jul 3, 2023 18:21:20 GMT
Catch-up comments on Western Stars: I hadn't listened to this album until this thread. I think I was a little worried it would be too "country" for my taste and/or that Bruce would lean into that sort of vocal styling/character voice that first emerged in the late 80s/early 90s that I've never cared too much for. Anyway, I was completely off-base with those concerns. I had rated the album a 7 for this thread, but I'd like to revise my vote to an 8 if that's not too much trouble, Kapitan , as I've continued to listen to the album and am more impressed with each listen. I agree that it's a great sounding album. Again, I'm really noticing how great Bruce sounds, vocally. It's a very organic-sounding album and it's very tastefully produced. Songwriting-wise, I think it's consistently 'very good'. I ended up rating 10 of the 13 tracks between 7.75 and 8.25 with the others just .25 away. I think my favorites are "Western Stars", "Sundown", "Hello Sunshine", "There Goes My Miracle", and "Moonlight Motel". I really like the guitar picking on the latter. And I really like the lines in "Drive Fast": And I like the songwriting trick of opening and closing the song with those same lines. Oh, and I also agree wholeheartedly regarding Bruce singing in his "Roy Orbison" voice at times - and I like it. Just a very impressive piece of work. It's not so much any of the individual tracks (although, I could list things I like about all of them), it's the album as a whole that I find impressive. And I think it's an album that would stand up well to repeated listens. On one hand, it's a pleasant and easy listen, but there's also enough there to keep you interested. This ended up being a surprise for me. I wasn't expecting to like it that much. I just couldn't get around to listening to it. Based on what I'd heard, I thought I'd like Letter to You more. That turned out not to be the case. This is the first 8 that I've awarded since 1992's Lucky Town.
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 3, 2023 18:27:01 GMT
Catch-up comments on Western Stars: I hadn't listened to this album until this thread. I think I was a little worried it would be too "country" for my taste and/or that Bruce would lean into that sort of vocal styling/character voice that first emerged in the late 80s/early 90s that I've never cared too much for. Anyway, I was completely off-base with those concerns. I had rated the album a 7 for this thread, but I'd like to revise my vote to an 8 if that's not too much trouble, Kapitan , as I've continued to listen to the album and am more impressed with each listen. Glad to do it! Especially as I was hoping to see it rate a bit higher than where it ended up (though it was a respectable showing). When there are just three regular voters, one person changing one point actually can matter!
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Post by kds on Jul 3, 2023 18:58:30 GMT
I'm giving Only the Strong Survive a five. I almost rounded up to a six on the strength of some of the material. But, I just can't do it.
I'd have probably given this another listen or two but, as this week leads up to vacation, Wednesday and Thursday could be pretty hectic. And, I won't be able to tomorrow.
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