Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

I saw her standing on her front lawn just twirlin her baton/ Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died...

I've seen this album described, half-jokingly, as Springsteen's emo record. If you've already heard Nebraska, you might just understand that. Emo like Moss Icon at their most repetitively circular and dirge-like, perhaps, or Hoover in one of their most pyschologically anguished ultra-quiet build-ups. You see, Bruce brings a lot of emotion to this recording, but it's not the heart-on-sleeve, slightly melancholy exuberance of Born to Run - instead, it's a catalogue of despair and brooding, incipient sadness. Often, it's not merely 'eerily' quiet, it's goddamn scarily quiet.

Mister state trooper, please don't stop me...

In fact, there's a different niche of punk that this album takes its influence: Suicide. Springsteen was a big fan of the no-wave New York minimalist duo, and presumably still is, since they continue to put out some very good stuff. Not only is their a sonic affinity audible in the sparse, empty arrangement of the album as whole, but one song - 'State Trooper' - is a direct homage to classic '77 Suicide. The same hollowed-out motorycle-engine beats, the same tense vocal delivery. It's not quite as terrifying as 'Frankie Teardrop', but it comes close.

I got debts that no honest man can pay...

If Kerosene 454 is a "temple" to the DC guitar sound, Nebraska is equally - if inversely - monumental to the Springsteen sound. Listen to 'Atlantic City' and it follows the familiar curve, except the song stays mostly subdued and hollowly, painfully empty. Springsteen always was a Dylanite, and the harmonica is prominent here, but it sounds like a voice from another room. The folksy singing and the lulling, melodic guitar licks are there too, but hovering just above silence. The voice or the harmonica swells, a haunting backing vocal intrudes, the guitar strumming gains some insistence, but still 9/10ths of this recording still sounds like lonely emptiness. Nebraska is a cold, black quietness largely uninterrupted by anything other than deeply human pain.

Well now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back...

Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska