High Hopes

A bygone feel permeates a few of the songs; the joyful saloon rock of Frankie Fell In Love takes listeners back to The River, and Down In The Hole recalls the more reflective Bruce of Born In The USA and Tunnel Of Love.

With its sharply defined highs and curiously odd misses, there’s more than enough here for dedicated fans to sift through, to extrapolate new shades of Springsteen from. For the rest of us, though, there isn’t quite enough to hold our attention.

Given Morello’s dynamite live sets with the E Street Band, it’s a shame that the Springsteen album with his biggest influence is so underwhelming.

Too many songs disappoint, though.

High Hopes, being promoted as his 18th officially, is a mixed bag of covers, re-workings of songs that have appeared elsewhere, and previously unreleased material written for other projects. With some of the tracks, there's even overlap among these divisions.

There's a sombre edge to almost all these songs, even when the Hammond organ is wailing and the backbeat is a mile wide.... Morello's presence is crucial to the tone of the album. [Feb 2014, p.65]

Nearly all the tracks on High Hopes are wildly overproduced and arranged, leaving no room to rock.

Morello is all over this album with mixed results. There are some great songs here.

While Springsteen is notorious for painstakingly sequencing his albums, High Hopes was a losing battle--a puzzle with pieces that, more often than not, just don’t interlock.

[A] lackluster High Hopes.

With High Hopes, Springsteen splashes his brightest colors against a canvas, crosses his fingers, and hopes they mesh.

As an artist, he’s always lived and died by the principle that the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts. High Hopes, by contrast, is precisely as good as its best material and as bad as its worst, nothing more and nothing less.

The selections run the predictable gamut of great to interesting to wholly disposable, but the breadth of material here nonetheless reaffirms Springsteen’s talents as a songwriter and interpreter of others’ work.

The best of them--mostly the resigned or farseeing songs, the songs that have no hero and no story--rise above the odds. But a large portion of the record feels, let’s say, official.

Given that these recordings span different eras and sessions, High Hopes does have a cohesiveness, flow, and degrees of greatness, but unlike the career-spanning rarities comp Tracks, there's nothing about these lost or revisited songs that screams out "Jackpot!"

For a stopgap release that no one expected, assembled from outtakes, B-sides, and covers that all but the most ardent Bruce followers would call inessential, High Hopes is still a remarkably cohesive and consistent record, and serves as a wonderful way to kick off 2014.

Little wonder the two finest moments ["Hunter of Invisible Game" and "The Wall"] on this otherwise ho-hum Springsteen album are by a considerable margin its most understated.

There’s something about High Hopes’ slight incoherence that actually stands to its advantage--it’s a less homogenous, polished whole than Magic or The Rising and a fresher, more arresting listen.

Still The Boss.

An unwelcome presence, Morello is simply the most obvious of many elements on High Hopes that just don’t work. It’s all the more unfortunate given that there are actually some redeemable songs here, along with some brief glimpses of Springsteen the rock'n'roll storyteller.

Even looking backwards, Springsteen finds ways to light the road ahead.

[The record] takes the idea of a stopgap album full of odds and ends and reimagines it as something much more satisfying.

As such, High Hopes is a standstill album, momentous for being the first effort in a long time where The Boss appears speechless at the podium.

Morello appears on most of the tracks here, and he's largely an enlivening presence, electrifying Springsteen's revolutionary spark, but he still hasn't figured out how to open up a solo without changing the entire tone of a song. Springsteen himself has a similar problem, struggling to deliver pointed social critique without sliding into his comfort zones.

Perhaps its on-the-hoof, anomalous nature is the source of a sense that High Hopes, though good, doesn't feel either like a set of surprising others sides or quite as cohesive or great as the title of 'new Springsteen album' (as opposed to say 'iTunes bonus tracks', or 'B-side collection', which might have been more fitting categories) might demand.

High Hopes may be a stopgap, but it is one assembled with tender, loving care.

When your Springsteen itch needs scratching, only a few of these even three months from now are going to pass muster. But it's not like you'll be starved for choices.

There’s not much new here, but Springsteen has always traded on a maudlin permanent nostalgia that only works because it’s so fucking earnest that it blasts through our attempts to be cynical about it.

It's well within the Boss' right to try and freshen up old material, especially 18 albums in, but this one lacks a through-line beyond the distracting (and occasionally straight-up embarrassing) Morello.

Strictly speaking, these 12 songs don't cohere into a mood or narrative but after two decades of deliberate, purposeful albums, it's rather thrilling to hear Springsteen revel in a mess of contradictions.

There’s a spirit of collaboration that is largely new, a genuine and warm-hearted celebration of past members’ contributions and a celebration of the rowdy, uplifting storm cooked up by the 18-strong modern incarnation of the group.

In spite of its shortcomings, High Hopes will tide fans over until the next bona fide LP.

The cumulative effect of this mass of old, borrowed, blue and renewed – covers, recent outtakes and redefining takes on two classics--is retrospect with a cutting edge, running like one of the singer's epic look-ma-no-set-list gigs: full of surprises, all with a reason for being there.

[Morello's] contributions feel inventive, versatile and natural, like an extension of the direction Springsteen was already moving in.... Aniello's production work definitely enhances and does not distract from or obscure the tracks.

Songs about decades-old social injustices should make him sound out of touch, but High Hopes still crackles with immediacy, despite the cobbled-together nature of the material.

Though lacking the thematic unity one expects from Springsteen albums, High Hopes has much to recommend it, particularly the way that Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello has re-invigorated old material like “American Skin (41 Shots)” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad”.

It's a pleasing patchwork of echoes of the past. [Feb 2014, p.92]

Perhaps inevitably, given the material's scattered provenance High Hopes lacks the cohesion, both thematic and sonic that characterised Magic and Wrecking Ball. [Feb 2014, p.86]

A record that unfolds like a collection of short stories, occasionally hokey but more often affectingly vivid. [Feb 2014, p.108]

High Hopes plays very much like a sequel to Wrecking Ball, but Springsteen is less angry and blameful, more cheerfully weary this time around.