The River Review

The stated ambition was to put the live show and the serious writing on the same object, and that is exactly what happens, for better and worse. Hungry Heart is a pop single with a hook borrowed from decades of radio, and it sits three tracks from the title song, in which a teenage pregnancy leads to a construction job and a memory of a river that has dried up.

Both are the same album. Point Blank, Stolen Car and Wreck on the Highway are as desolate as anything he has written. Cadillac Ranch, Crush on You and I'm a Rocker are filler he defended as necessary texture, and they are still filler. Eighty four minutes is a lot to ask, and the throwaways cost the record its concentration. What it gains is breadth: no other Springsteen album covers this much emotional ground, and the good half of it stands with anything he made.