Sweeping and majestic, Springsteen's fourth album was his first to fully descend into hopelessness. Compare the blank look on the cover Darkness on the Edge of Town to the giddy tension on Born to Run (and compare those titles, besides). Springsteen's albums had always been about escape, about ecstatic figures on a desolate ground. Those moments where the sun cracks the clouds are still around, but these are songs about the storm, about the darkness, not the town.
The album embraces it, with workmanlike post-mad dog drums dragging us onward to something worse, extolling the beauty of a fire that will consume the world. And along the way Bruce's voice soars, the music swelling huge, building a monument to a world too great and endless to notice us at all 4/5
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