Bruce Springsteen

It's always been difficult to determine what kind of musician Bruce Springsteen is exactly. Amidst his long career of boisterous stadium rockers, he has every so often managed to sneak in quiet, somber little odes to the desolate corners of a darker Americana.

Throughout the mellow, acoustic landscapes of these folk-rooted departures-probably best exemplified by the 1982 masterpiece Nebraska-Springsteen casts an uncharacteristically bleak gaze towards subject matters such as isolation, poverty and mourning. These darker tonalities begin to call into question which side of this bipolar mess is the real Boss.

On Magic, Springsteen presents a stylized fusion of the two. The result may be his manifesto-an album that celebrates America while lamenting its loss. On the surface, the album resounds with all the musical flourishes of old, marking the long-awaited return to the glory days of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Songs such as "Radio Nowhere," the album's innocuous single, burst with all the traditional elements, layered-and occasionally muddled-together to create something that is big, complex and unerringly loud.

But even with all this big-band bombast, Magic manages to showcase Springsteen's pained, vulnerable side. "Livin' in the Future" rolls with all the pop punches of a classic rock favorite, right up to the inane final "Na Na" chorus. But when Springsteen sings of how he "Woke up election day/Sky's gunpowder and shades of gray," and how his "Faith's been torn asunder," it becomes clear that there's an imbedded solemnity to the song. Here, like on much of Magic, Springsteen plays to an idealized musical form, only to undercut it with grim reminders of the fact that "Liberty, it sailed away."

Political yet personal, the lyrics on Magic are some of Springsteen's darkest yet, not especially because of their singular gravity, but because of their juxtaposition with once-hopeful musical counterparts. Springsteen effectively joins the triumphal with the brooding, simultaneously romanticizing and deconstructing his subjects, a process which renders their fall all the more poignant.