Bruce Springsteen We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (Columbia)
Near the end of "Mrs. McGrath," a nineteenth-century Irish ballad that is the third track on Bruce Springsteen's new album, comes a couplet that gives a pretty good sense of why he's putting out an album of traditional folk music right now: "All foreign wars, I do proclaim/Live on blood and a mother's pain." We Shall Overcome -- which was recorded live in Springsteen's New Jersey home with a fourteen-piece band, including horns, banjo, fiddles, washboard, organ and accordion -- is his most jubilant disc since Born in the U.S.A. and more fun than a tribute to Pete Seeger has any right to be. But as on Born in the U.S.A., seemingly triumphant anthems are paired with lyrics of pain and protest that champion the oppressed and the exploited (not to mention the calamity-prone protagonist of "My Oklahoma Home," whose wife, house and crops get blown away by a tornado, leaving him with nothing but a mortgage).
Springsteen has always mined a deep vein of Americana, from the hot-rod-and-B-movie-obsessed early albums to the Steinbeckian social realism of The Ghost of Tom Joad and last year's Devils and Dust. But with his first-ever album of songs written by other people, it feels like he's turned to the music of our shared past to find a moral compass for a nation that's gone off the rails. The protest anthems "Eyes on the Prize" and "We Shall Overcome" are performed with an understated urgency; the gospel standard "Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep" -- which Springsteen sings in a gruff Tom Waits-ish baritone and to which the Seeger Sessions Band gives a Dixieland treatment with Stephane Grappelli-style violin -- promises, "Brothers and sisters, don't you cry/There'll be good times by and by."
Springsteen discovered most of these tunes -- which also include sea chanteys ("Pay Me My Money Down"), minstrel songs ("Old Dan Tucker") and outlaw ballads ("Jessie James") -- on LPs by Seeger. Among the pleasures of this album is rediscovering childhood staples like "Erie Canal" or "John Henry" via Springsteen's craggy, familiar voice -- which is as mighty and powerful as the steel-driving man himself. (JONATHAN RINGEN)
The Streets The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living (Vice)
Mike Skinner, the English producer-rapper who calls himself the Streets, debuted four years ago with a blessedly original album that mixed darting two-step beats with deft, cockney-voiced rhymes about gray-skied suburbs and PlayStation addicts. He followed that up with a sparer concept record about a week in the life of a drunken lout. Skinner's new album is a Behind the Music episode converted into a diffuse, rave-schooled song cycle, with increasingly skittery beats framing autobiographical tales about paranoid cocaine binges and Skinner's dead father. Skinner is still a singular rhymer, mixing up soused spluttering, jokey asides and change-on-a-dime rhythm patterns with witty narrative detail on "War of the Sexes" and "When You Wasn't Famous," a dancehall-flavored banger about hooking up with an unnamed pop star of greater renown. Skinner's a lovable lout with a tender side, and if he's no longer pushing the envelope, that's understandable: It sounds like he needed to get his sprawling, drug-soaked confessional record out of his system. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris All the Roadrunning (Warner Bros.)
All the Roadrunning is an elegant, sometimes sleepy collection of country-folk duets pairing Dire Straits' former frontman with one of Nashville's elder stateswomen. Mark Knopfler, who's been working in roots mode for a while now on his solo records, sings in a shopworn tenor and works up graceful harmonies with Emmylou Harris, whose crystalline voice is put to better use here than on her arty recent records. The pair mostly keep the tempos slow and the arrangements light on these portraits of heartbreak and small-town life, and a handful of songs -- including the reggae-tinged "Rollin' On" -- meander by unremarkably. But ballads like the title track and the Springsteen-esque "Beyond My Wildest Dreams" are world-wise and gently gorgeous. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)
The Goo Goo Dolls Let Love In (Warner Bros.)
With help from superproducer Glen Ballard, the tenth album from this Buffalo trio outfits its trademark mix of stylized arena-rock guitars and huge romantic choruses with subtle atmospherics and a bright pop sheen. Still, Let Love In burns with the same slightly cheesy Springsteenian passion as the Dolls' multiplatinum records, with Johnny Rzeznik working up ragged gold sounds in his everyman drawl on catchy prom ballads like "Better Days." (CHRISTIAN HOARD)
