With few exceptions, nothing interesting has been done with string sections in the last 50 years. With even fewer exceptions, Bruce Springsteen hasn’t done anything interesting for the last 23 years. Devils and Dust proves that both rules still hold.
It’s clear from the get-go that no one’s doing the E Street shuffle here. This album is Bruce in full preach mode, which means lots of tales of sin, stripped-down instrumentation and syrupy string sections that are supposed to remind us all of how serious the subject matter is. Springsteen succeeded in the past by working these sorts of stories into great pop songs; here he doesn’t even bother.
The title track showcases most of the problems with Devils. At first the Boss seems to be off to a good start, but then the strings kick in for the second verse. The deathblow comes in the third verse as a stale electronic beat cycles under the whole mess, leaving the song sounding more like a top-rate airline commercial than a Springsteen song. It’s an especially disappointing approach because he has proven, most clearly with 1982’s Nebraska, that he can get his point across with just an acoustic guitar and his voice.
The album does have its moments: the rabble-rousing, falsetto-laden “Maria’s Bed” is a great track, and the gorgeous closer “Matamoros Banks” hints at what the album could have been. For each of these, though, there are a handful of middling songs. The first half of the album is particularly non descript, with only the shocking sexual explicitness of “Reno” standing out. It feels like there are good songs buried in here somewhere under the trite, overwrought production, but it’s hardly worth digging through Devils and Dust to find them.
