Customer Reviews

Darkness On The Edge Of Town

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one of if not my favourite BS album.
from the opening lines
"lights out tonite, trouble in the heartland.....
i don't give a damn for the same old played-out scenes....
my fave line "for the ones who had a notion deep inside, that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive, gonna find one face that ain't lookin' through me, gonna one place, i wanna spit in the face of these badlands......
to the final track, "nobody asks too many questions or stare too long at your face............."
raw & gritty, classic springsteen, everything in his heart from his upbringing spilling out here......

If this album isn't on your top twenty you have to be crazy! What incredible, immediate, poweful, and heartfelt songwriting. It simply doesn't get much better than this.

Bruce Springsteen has always have a strong personal integrity. He has always gone his own way in life. Against his father, and against the music buissness. When his father told him to be a lawyer and his mother wanted him to be a writer, he wanted to be a rock n' roll star. So he did. And got in trouble with his former manager, Mike Appel. Mike put him into a slavery contract, and after the fantastic album Born To Run, he wanted to break up from that contract. It took 2 years in court to break up from it, and Mr Springsteen was really angry. He wanted to go his own way in life, as he always have done. The result can you hear on this awsome album, probably the best album he has ever done. This is the punky Springsteen! Joe Strummer couldn't have done it better.
On this album, Springsteen hasn't a star producer, cause he didn't want to. He let Jon Landau, a former music critic from the Rolling Stone Magazine, produce together with him. The sound is simpler and more raw, but it fit with the anger and strength in the songs. The songs are totally awsome! Do I have to say Badlands? What a song! A timeless masterpiece! Always something to say to us, even today! Full of hope and optimism, but also anger and strentgh. Factory: A song which is short and seems to be not much of a song, but listen what Springsteen has to say in that song... It's awsome! Adam rise a cain... Listen to the anger in that song...
Racing in the street is wonderful as a ballad. Candy's room: Listen how nice Springsteen describe the prostituted woman that he met. He's a true human guy!
All songs are fantastic!
And if you really want to know how good Springsteen was that year, listen to the Winterland Night bootleg! Then you know how really awsome he really is...

You HAVE TO buy this album!! Or DIE!!

It is hard to put in words how great this album is. How does a legend like Bruce top such a great album as "Born to Run"? By making an album that is perfect. Darkness kicks into gear with the first cut, "Badlands," a moving and dynamic Springsteen classic. The remarkable cuts keep coming, with such classics as "Candy's Room." Heck, every cut on this album is a classic. Just talking about it makes me want to pull it out and pop it in the CD player. Come to think of it, see ya.

Forget "Born to Run". Forget "Born In the USA". Forget it all for a little while. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" stands alone as Bruce's truly defining album. It is his first foray into the dark side of life. It is the place where the characters in "BTR" ended up--a roadblock on Bruce's long highway. His optimism has waned and his perspective is bleak. Bruce is no longer lookiing through the eyes of a teenage rebel with a dream.

Despite the legal battles behind the scenes of this album that were quite the catalyst for his descent into darkness, it seems like it was the only logical way to go after embarking on the hopeful escapes in his first three albums. It was the natural progression of his maturity into the music. I would be so bold to say that without this record, Bruce Springsteen may have never reached the heights that this newfound lease on life provided him.

But...enough with my take on the importance of "Darkness...". The songs speak for themselves on this record. I think the best track is "The Promised Land" because it is like the workingman's anthem, so to speak. It is Bruce declaring that even though he is living a desolate, machine-like existence just to get by in the cruel world, he still holds on to the dreams of the promised land. Another favorite of mine on the album is the title track. His passion in this particular song you can feel in your veins...literally.

But...the showstopper track has to be "Racing in the Street." When I first heard this heartwrenching masterpiece, it gave me chills. I do believe that it is probably the most painfully beautiful song I have ever heard. The reality of it will floor you alone.

Overall, the anguish of Bruce on this record can be heard in every track. From the understated cynicism, to his angered and wounded cries and shrieks, this record is a MUST OWN.

Although Darkness On The Edge Of Town is a dark album, it is not uniformly gloomy since its despairing moments are often spectacularly swept away by powerful blasts of defiance bursting forth in songs like The Promised Land or Badlands ("We'll keep pushin' till it's understood/and these badlands start treating us good").

There is an awesome grandeur in the tone and the sound, driven as it is by majestic guitars, thunderous drums, sweeping sax and wailing harmonica. The myth of the highway and the freedom it offers, following on from Born To Run, is most dramatically explored in songs like Racing In The Streets and Streets Of Fire.

The redemptive power of love surfaces on the beautiful Prove It All Night, whilst the title track is melancholy and erotic at the same time, a brooding ballad of evocative imagery. This is classic Springsteen, a very cohesive album that displays his mastery of both the fast-paced rock song and the introspective ballad. Powerful music.

That would be a gross understatement.
This is the single greatest creation of all time.
Dylan may be better than Springsteen but he never made Darkness on The Edge of Town.

Bruce Springsteen's fourth album, "Born To Run", was three years in the making, and it didn't quite match the sales of its predecessor, "Born To Run".

The production on "Darkness" is also less elaborate than on the grandiose "Born To Run", and the songs are perhaps a little less epic as well, and certainly as tight and structured as anything Bruce Springsteen had made at the time.
This album found him sounding more and more like a traditional "heartland rocker", and it nevertheless features some of his best songs, including the tough rockers "Badlands" and "Adam Raised A Cain", the grand ballad "Something In The Night", the melodious pop-rock of "Prove It All Night", and the slow, bluesy rock of the title track.

The lyrics are often bleak, but the arrangements, filled with thumping drums, tinkling piano and swelling organ notes, are grand and full-bodied and even joyous, making "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" one of Bruce Springsteen's best and most consistent records, a must-have for any serious fan.

He would have been hard-pressed to outshine Bruce Springsteen. I first bought this LP in 1978, as a 16 year-old, on the strength of having loved "Born To Run." The mood shift is clear from the opening track, perhaps my favorite rock 'n' roll song: "Badlands." Coming out when it did - 1978 - with factories closing all around my native Detroit, malaise gripping the country, hostages taken in Iran the next year, et cetera, this work combined songs mixing equal measures of hope and despair.
As another reviewer noted, this was also the first rock 'n' roll album I heard dealing with adult themes - from the fantastical workd of the Magic Rat, et al, on "Born To Run" to flesh-and-blood Joes and Janes trying to keep hope alive, this was a new experience, and a necessary one, as oldies about going to the Hop do not speak to the realities of adult life.
More than any other LP, this one deals with how the artist relates to his father. Count the number of serious songs dealing with father-child relationships in contemporary music - they are rare. "Adam Raised A Cain" and "Factory" are clearly attempts to come to terms with his father - like many men of his generation, a soul whose life revolved around supporting a family by doing brutal, drudge work, with nothing to hope for except making it in one piece to the next day ("Through the mansions of fear/Through the mansions of pain/Watch my Daddy walk through them factory gates in the rain"). The former also reveals that something in catechism must've stuck, because the track is bathed in Christian imagery - in some places more subtly than in others ("...You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past").
After not hearing any of the songs in 20 years (and Springsteen is rarely on the radio - then usually "Born In The USA" or "Born To Run"), I bought "Darkness" on cassette to have something to keep me awake while driving my 'big, old Buick'- and the raw emotional power of every song, sung as though he meant every word, autobiographically perhaps, struck me again, just as it had in 1978. After 25 years, in a post-9/11 world, with factories closing all around my native Detroit (and elsewhere), perhaps that's more than just a coincidence.
I'll second the reviewer who said that if he had to own one rock 'n' roll CD, that it would be "Darkness."
-Lloyd A. Conway
P.S. After 25 years, I still believe in the Promised Land

I am a huge Bruce Springsteen fan and if asked the question which Springsteen disc I liked best, I would probably say its a near toss-up between this disc and the classic Born to Run. Why such lofty praise for this disc? Because Darkness On the Edge of Town is an album that captures Bruce and the E Street Band at the top of their game. Not quite 29 years old when this album was released in the summer of 1978, Springsteen sings with a youthful defiance, which exudes a great deal of energy and passion. A number of Bruce's greatest songs are here: Badlands, Candy's Room, Racing in the Street, The Promised Land, Prove it All Night and Darkness on the Edge of Town. On this album, Bruce uses both upbeat rock songs and haunting slower songs to tell his characters' stories, and as any Springsteen fan already knows, he is an amazing storyteller.

The stories here are generally told from the perspective of proud, working-class people who are doing their best to stay optimistic, while struggling in their lives. These are the types of people that Springsteen grew up around in his native New Jersey, so his portrayals of such people in these songs are rich with detail and dead-on accurate. Some of my personal favorite moments on this album are as follows: 1.)Racing in the Streets-A beautiful song about a guy who refuses to grow up and become responsible and is slowly realizing that it is costing him his relationship with his neglected wife; 2.)Darkness on the Edge of Town-In this song, a guy's refusal to grow up and become responsible have already cost him his marriage. Despite realizing this, he seems resigned to accept the fact that he is incapable of changing his ways, no matter what its cost him; 3.) Candy's Room-I may be wrong, but it always seemed to me that this upbeat rock song was a story about a guy who is in love with a prostitute and believes that his genuine love for her can make her truly happy and get her to give up her occupation-sort of like the story line for the classic song by The Police titled Roxanne; and 4.)The Promised Land-A great song about someone who is struggling, but is able to maintain their faith in the midst of that struggle.

In conclusion, I am 29 and have found Bruce Springsteen's music to be richly rewarding over the 8 years I've been a fan. The stories in his songs continue to touch my soul no matter how often I hear them. He is, in my humble opinion, truly one of the all-time great musicians, singer-songwriters and live performers. However, any Greatest Hits album doesn't really do him justice, you really are better off selecting individual albums from his body of work. That being said, you cannot go wrong with Darkness on the Edge of Town, I highly recommend it!