The Promise

The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs from material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best.

The Promise hits a ceiling just below what you'd call essential listening, but it's still more than just a fan-only release. These 22 songs show a band at the height of their powers stretching out and trying new things, indulging in their musical loves to bright and catchy results.

Though recorded during the same extended sessions, this archival LP is the polar opposite of its fraternal twin: big, bold, vibrantly coloured and laced with sweeping chorus hooks and towering middle eights. In a word, spectacular.

Ultimately, the official album remains the crucible of the artist who flourishes to this day. [Dec 2010, p.112]

The Promise itself is a strange thing, less a companion to Darkness than the blueprint for a lost sequel to Born To Run. [Dec 2010, p.118]

The Promise is what got left behind, and the quality of these 21 songs serves to remind the listener how brilliant Darkness On The Edge Of Town really was, and how discerning its craftsmen must have been to leave so much in the dust.

[The Promise's] elegiac tone would have fitted Darkness perfectly, but most of the other 20 previously unreleased tracks demonstrate that Springsteen never actually stopped writing the hook-laden, audience-rousing crackers with which he made his name.

Keep your sense of perspective and remember that The Promise really is an offcuts record, and you'll find it's a staggeringly good one.

The two-disc The Promise collects 22 leftovers (including "The Way," an excellent unlisted bonus track), none of them previously included on Springsteen's Tracks box set, all of them polished, to one extent or another, in recent years. Some, like "Breakaway" and the title track--a longtime fan favorite previously released only in a version rerecorded in 1999--fit Darkness' themes perfectly.

The joy of The Promise: The Lost Sessions of Darkness on the Edge of Town for any serious Boss employee is the notable twinkle of notions that would later grow into classic rock staples.

In the end, the artificial pop of The Promise makes it, as a whole, a more realistic album.

While curiosities and lost tracks usually only appeal to the fan who has everything, this album stands as a perfect complement to Springsteen's mid-70s work.

The Promise is as compelling an advert for the Boss's beautiful, blue-collar soul as you're likely to find outside of the hits; an indispensible portrait of an artist at the top of his game. File this one under American Greats.

The Promise album, with gems like the Crystals' homage "Ain't Good Enough for You" and the lilting ballad "Candy's Boy" (a far cry from "Darkness' " aggressively lustful revision "Candy's Room") showcases the danceability, catchiness and even sentimentality Springsteen had to rein in to create "Darkness."

The Promise demonstrates how wide-ranging Springsteen's musical interests and abilities were when he was 27.