Springsteen's Devils and Dust -- DVD Content

Columbia's new CD release of Bruce Springsteen's Devils and Dust is a flipper disc -- the full album is on one side and is playable as a CD, while on the other side you'll find the full album again, except this time recorded in the DVD format and re-mixed in 5.1 with on-screen lyrics that play along with the music. No special equipment is needed, just your DVD player and a 5.1 receiver.

Additionally on the DVD side, there is an extended video section with footage of Springsteen performing five of the album's songs in their entirety and talking about the inspirations for the album.

Just a few quick words about the DVD content:

* The 5.1 mix for the music tracks is breathtaking. Sharp, highly-detailed, well-supported by the rears without being showy. I wasn't expecting the lyrics to play on-screen along with the songs. A nice touch.

* Surprisingly, the "live performance" video section of the disc is not in 5.1, and the audio is thin and limited. Lots of room tone with little presence or low-end.

* The video footage during the "live performance" section is typical music-video fodder -- high-contrast, digitally-graded, edit-happy nonsense. One gets the sense that Springsteen showed up at an old house, played his five songs in a 2nd-floor bedroom, chatted a bit, and went home, leaving the director and crew to run around the house to try and find some cut-away footage...footage of walls, stairs, mirrors, rugs, the back yard, etc. The final result is stylish, but it seems to have little tangible connection with Springsteen's songs.

* As for the music itself, I'm not a music critic. This is the third "acoustic" album by the Boss, after the award-winning Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad albums. Devils and Dust is not as grim as Tom Joad, nor is it as sparse, with several songs featuring full support (even string accompaniment). The standouts (for me) are "Reno", a sexually-explicit song about a man's encounter with a prostitute while longing for his wife, and "Matamoros Banks", a tale told by a corpse who has drowned in a river and (once again) longs to be with his loved one. The least effective song is the title-track, which is too derivative of Sprinsgteen's own "Blood Brothers" and strangely shallow given the subject matter (a soldier in Iraq doubting his cause). "Devils and Dust" is the only newly-written song on the new album, almost all the others were written while Springsteen was on tour for The Ghost of Tom Joad back in the mid-90's, while "All the Way Home" was written in 1991 during Springsteen's Lucky Town/Human Touch projects. During "All the Way Home", astute Springsteen fans will pick up on a few recycled lyrics from Lucky Town's "My Beautiful Reward".

I haven't yet formed an opinion of the album as a whole. Nebraska and Tom Joad had a unifying sound to them, track-to-track. Devils and Dust has a unifying *theme* -- longing for a loved one separated by time or distance or mortality.

"Reno" reminds me of Lyle Lovett's work back in the early-to-mid 90's -- a sparse rhythmic line, a simple melody, and an honest narrative with a sting in its tail. Springsteen has always longed to make you walk in another man's shoes, has said that's what he thought all forms of popular art are supposed to be about, and he certainly does that with Reno. If the whole album had been that good, it would have been another masterwork like Nebraska or Tunnel of Love. Right now, I think the album is a bit disjointed, and the title track the weakest song Springsteen has written since "57 Channels".

The video segment with the four acoustic songs has a 24 bit 48kHz audio track.

This should encapsulate the reasoning why high bit-rate doesn't mean "great sound quality". A high bit rate of a severely limited audio recording isn't going to wave a wand and turn it into gold. The audio here is very limited, very midrange, no high end, no low end -- your average high-end camcorder could probably pick up comparable audio.