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The River

by

Bruce Springsteen

 
The River
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Avg: 4.0 (369 ratings)

  • Date Released: October 10, 1980
  • Genre: Rock/Pop
  • Style: Rock
  • Label: Columbia
  • Copyright: (P) 1980 Bruce Springsteen

  • We Say...

    Review by Glenn Kenny

    This record has a deck-clearing swagger that’s entirely appropriate to its original format — the vinyl double album. It’s full of tunes that are great to chug beer and pump fists to — titles such as "Sherry Darling," "I’m A Rocker," "Out In The Street," "Crush on You," "Cadillac Ranch" all speak for themselves. Then of course, there’s "Hungry Heart," the first Springsteen song to have a big Top 40 impact, and a tune that Bruce had originally shopped to the Ramones. As much fun as it is, the record’s not entirely light-hearted and, in fact, Springsteen wrote a lot of the darker tunes late in the album’s recording, in the interest of creating a wider-ranging, more fleshed-out record. The title track and "Point Blank" are two of his finest ballads, and the latter is one of his most harrowing songs. Then there’s the epic "Drive All Night," which has more in common with the drony avant-rock of Suicide (a band whose influence Springsteen would acknowledge years later with a cover of their "Dream Baby Dream") than with "Jungleland." And finally, the album’s quietly haunting closer, "Wreck on the Highway," once heard, never forgotten.

  • They Say...

    Review by William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

    Imbedded within the double-disc running time of The River is a single-disc album that follows up on the themes and sound of Darkness on the Edge of Town -- wide-screen, midtempo rock and stories of the disillusionment of working-class life and the conflicts within families. In these songs, which include the title track, "Independence Day," and "Point Blank," Bruce Springsteen's world-view is just as dire as it had become on Darkness, but less judgmental. "Independence Day," for example, is a father-and-son ballad that has little of the anger of its hard rock counterpart on Darkness, "Adam Raised a Cain." Springsteen's heroes again seek to overcome their crushing troubles through defiance and by driving around, and though "The River" repeats the soured love theme of "Racing in the Street," he also posits romance as a possible escape, sometimes combining it with one of the other solutions, as on the eight-plus-minute "Drive All Night." But there is also another album lurking within The River, and it is a more lighthearted pop/rock collection of short, sometimes humorous songs like "Sherry Darling" and "I'm a Rocker." At times Springsteen combines elements of the two, as on "Out in the Street," perhaps the album's quintessential song, a catchy, uptempo number that sounds like something from the early '60s and echoes the theme of the Vogues' 1966 hit "Five O'Clock World." "Hungry Heart," which became Springsteen's first Top Ten hit, combines a rollicking musical track with a more sober lyrical theme that emphasizes longing over disappointment. But a better guide to Springsteen's development are the songs "Stolen Car" and the album-closing "Wreck on the Highway," gentle, moody ballads imbued with a sense of hopelessness that anticipate his next record, Nebraska.

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