Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball, CD review Unemployment, wasted lives, economic blight, the personal consequences of political action, the global financial crisis are Springsteen's lyrical bread and butter. Arguably Nebraska (1982) was bleaker and The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) more thoughtful, but on those albums the subdued musical tone mirrored the lyrics. Darkness On the Edge of Town (1978) and The River (1980) tackled the same issues with narratives (and, indeed, music) more complex and poetically ambiguous than anything here. There is a quality of repetition and reduction on Wrecking Ball, a sense of distilling the essence of his oeuvre to make the message more potent. You can certainly delight in the kind of uplifting surges that will inspire fist-waving explosions of joy at an E Street Band concert, but pay anything but the most arbitrary attention and you are confronted with a sense of fury just a chord change away from despair. On the title track, Springsteen twice exhorts his listeners to "hold tight to your anger" as if he is trying to drive home a burning sense of injustice and goad victims of economic and ideological theft into action. We've had Occupy Wall Street. Now Springsteen seems to be on a mission to occupy the charts and the stadiums. Time and again, he rails against bankers, equating them with the "robber barons" of American history, and urging a resistance that comes close to insurrection. To the forlorn piano waltz of Jack-Of-All-Trades, Springsteen's stoic victim of unemployment admits "If I had a gun / I'd find the bastards and shoot them on sight." On Death To My Hometown, martial beat and tootling pipes house archaic lyrical imagery, as Springsteen angrily laments economic destruction, evoking a new kind of civil war. Marrying the folk roots of 2006"s colourful Seeger Sessions with contemporary digital flourishes, rock hard drums, subtle synths and snatched samples of field recordings of ghostly protest, the musical message is that nothing really changes. On the extended ending of the title track, Springsteen repeats "hard times come and hard times go" several times before a roar of "yeah, just to come again." The air of defiance comes perilously close to a kind of heroic defeatism. Calling out "bring on your wrecking ball," Springsteen's narrator sounds like an old outlaw facing down impossible odds at the end of a bloody Sam Peckinpah western. Springsteen has clearly tried to construct an album of two halves, his character-driven depictions of America's disenfranchised leading to a brooding centre track, This Depression, before attempting to fight back with a call to higher powers. Musically, it concludes in a mood of exultation, with the gospel flavoured Rocky Ground and Land of Hope and Dreams, and the campfire folk of We are Alive. But there is a ring of false optimism in the overtly Christian imagery, as if all Springsteen can really offer is the possibility of heavenly rewards. Perhaps this is the very essence of Springsteen's oeuvre: coating bitter pills with rock-and-roll sugar.