High Hopes
*High Hopes* is the most unusual album in Bruce Springsteen\'s extensive catalog. It features three covers, two key Springsteen favorites brought up to date—“American Skin (41 Shots)” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad”—and a batch of great songs that are among the most sonically adventurous of the Boss\' career, courtesy of producer Ron Aniello and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. Versions of Tim Scott McConnell’s “High Hopes” and Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” bookend the record, but it’s Springsteen’s snarling take of Chris Bailey and The Saints’ 1986 single “Just Like Fire Would” that sounds like a lost E Street Band song from their late-\'70s prime. It\'s got the help of the NY Chamber Consort Strings and Morello, who adds heavier guitar touches throughout the album. “Heaven’s Wall” uses the same guests for a very different effect. “Down in the Hole” brings back the brooding synth magic of “I’m on Fire,\" while “The Wall” (a somber, personal tale of visiting the Vietnam War Memorial and remembering guys from the Asbury Park music scene who never returned home), feels like Bruce has struck the nerve that brings about his best work.
Bruce Springsteen’s 18th record, High Hopes, is a collection of new recordings of songs he's been playing for 10 or 12 years. They're essentially outtakes from The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream*,* but Springsteen re-recorded them with producer Ron Aniello—often with Tom Morello on guitar—and sequenced them into an album.
Bruce Springsteen’s legacy has avoided becoming synonymous with one single genre or movement. Though the 64-year-old has done everything from crafting arena-filling rock songs to hushed acoustic numbers, The Boss has long dedicated himself to rambunctiously chasing whatever muse he finds himself taken with at that…
An occasionally brilliant yet slightly lackluster collection of The Boss's favourite recent odds and ends - with added Tom Morello.
If The Boss had never made another record after Born in the U.S.A., it still would've been more than enough.
Cobbled together from covers -- of other songwriters along with the Boss himself ("American Skin [41 Shots]" and "The Ghost of Tom Joad" are both revived) -- and outtakes from the last decade, High Hopes doesn't have the cohesion or gilded surfaces of Wrecking Ball, but neither is it quite a clearinghouse of leftovers.
A shared history of political activism, rather than obvious musical lineage, bonds Tom Morello and The Boss. Hence why the Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist chose to accept Bruce Springsteen’s offer to fill in for right hand man Steve Van Zandt on the Australian leg of last year’s mammoth Wrecking Ball tour.
Bruce Springsteen's latest studio album, 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.
Album review: Bruce Springsteen - 'High Hopes'. Studio album number 18 is a pretty mixed bag from The Boss, whose missteps are palpably evident.
<p>Bruce Springsteen's album of offcuts, covers and reworkings adds up to a slice of the Boss at his best, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong></p>
A contrast to 2012's Wrecking Ball, Springsteen's 18th studio album is a ragbag collection of old material and covers, but lovingly assembled, finds <strong>Ian Gittins</strong>
Bruce Springsteen's new album, High Hopes, is a collection of revamped and re-recorded lost songs – but it doesn't quite fit together