Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 2.14 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 795 Mb
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© 1973-84, 2014 Columbia / Legacy / Sony Music / BS | 88875014142
Rock / Contemporary Rock / Heartland Rock

Today, Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings released Bruce Springsteen: The Album Collection Vol. 1 1973-1984, a boxed set comprised of remastered editions of the first seven albums recorded and released by Bruce Springsteen for Columbia Records between 1973 and 1984. All of the albums are newly remastered (five for the first time ever on CD) and all seven are making their remastered debut on vinyl. The seven albums are recreations of their original packaging and the set is accompanied by a 60-page book featuring rarely-seen photos, memorabilia and original press clippings from Springsteen’s first decade as a recording artist. Acclaimed engineer Bob Ludwig, working with Springsteen and longtime engineer Toby Scott, has remastered these albums, all newly transferred from the original analogue masters using the Plangent Process playback system.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Albums included:
Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (1973)*
The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle (1973)*
Born To Run (1975)
Darkness On The Edge Of Town (1978)
The River (1980)*
Nebraska (1982)*
Born In The U.S.A. (1984)*

*denotes first time remastered on CD

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Of all the major rock artists, Bruce Springsteen is the one whose catalog lay in a state of digital disrepair for the longest (Prince is the only conceivable rival for this title). Apart from Born to Run, which has been subjected to several anniversary reissues and audiophile releases, and Darkness on the Edge of Town, none of his first seven albums saw a sonic upgrade during the CD boom of the '80s and '90s. The Album Collection, Vol. 1 rights that longstanding wrong by offering fresh remasters of every album released between 1973's Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and 1984's Born in the U.S.A., including brand-new remasters for both Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, presenting all seven titles as paper-sleeve mini-LPs with replicated artwork.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Supervised by Bob Ludwig, the albums underwent a remastering technique called the Plangent Process and the difference between the original CDs and the 2014 editions is startling: these are filled with color and life. Naturally, the difference is especially vivid on records that have been neglected over the decades: Greetings surges with wild-eyed, open-hearted optimism, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle feels randy and robust, The River contains muscle and gravity, Born in the U.S.A. packs a wallop, and even Nebraska, a record made at home on a four-track, enjoys a clarity that doesn't sacrifice its essence.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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The new masters of Born to Run and Darkness are also rich but are only subtle improvements on the previous remasters; the reason to get the set is the other five records, which are finally given the treatment they deserve. Accompanying these superb remasters is a 60-page, high-gloss booklet that contains no original notes but has plenty of good press clips, photos, charts, and ads that capture Springsteen's first decade of recording. It's the icing on the cake on what's a necessary set. [The vinyl edition of The Album Collection, Vol. 1 has been mastered from 24-bit digital masters, not analog tapes.]

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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DISC 1: GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, N.J. (1973)
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 247 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 89 Mb

Bruce Springsteen's debut album found him squarely in the tradition of Bob Dylan: folk-based tunes arranged for an electric band featuring piano and organ (plus, in Springsteen's case, 1950s-style rock & roll tenor saxophone breaks), topped by acoustic guitar and a husky voice singing lyrics full of elaborate, even exaggerated imagery. But where Dylan had taken a world-weary, cynical tone, Springsteen was exuberant. His street scenes could be haunted and tragic, as they were in "Lost in the Flood," but they were still imbued with romanticism and a youthful energy. Asbury Park painted a portrait of teenagers cocksure of themselves, yet bowled over by their discovery of the world. It was saved from pretentiousness (if not preciousness) by its sense of humor and by the careful eye for detail that kept even the most high-flown language rooted. Like the lyrics, the arrangements were busy, but the melodies were well developed and the rhythms, pushed by drummer Vincent Lopez, were breakneck.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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DISC 2: THE WILD, THE INNOCENT & THE E STREET SHUFFLE (1974)
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Bruce Springsteen expanded the folk-rock approach of his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., to strains of jazz, among other styles, on its ambitious follow-up, released only eight months later. His chief musical lieutenant was keyboard player David Sancious, who lived on the E Street that gave the album and Springsteen's backup group its name. With his help, Springsteen created a street-life mosaic of suburban society that owed much in its outlook to Van Morrison's romanticization of Belfast in Astral Weeks. Though Springsteen expressed endless affection and much nostalgia, his message was clear: this was a goodbye-to-all-that from a man who was moving on. The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle represented an astonishing advance even from the remarkable promise of Greetings; the unbanded three-song second side in particular was a flawless piece of music. Musically and lyrically, Springsteen had brought an unruly muse under control and used it to make a mature statement that synthesized popular musical styles into complicated, well-executed arrangements and absorbing suites; it evoked a world precisely even as that world seemed to disappear. Following the personnel changes in the E Street Band in 1974, there is a conventional wisdom that this album is marred by production lapses and performance problems, specifically the drumming of Vini Lopez. None of that is true. Lopez's busy Keith Moon style is appropriate to the arrangements in a way his replacement, Max Weinberg, never could have been. The production is fine. And the album's songs contain the best realization of Springsteen's poetic vision, which soon enough would be tarnished by disillusionment. He would later make different albums, but he never made a better one. The truth is, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is one of the greatest albums in the history of rock & roll.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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DISC 3: BORN TO RUN (1975)
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Bruce Springsteen's make-or-break third album represented a sonic leap from his first two, which had been made for modest sums at a suburban studio; Born to Run was cut on a superstar budget, mostly at the Record Plant in New York. Springsteen's backup band had changed, with his two virtuoso players, keyboardist David Sancious and drummer Vini Lopez, replaced by the professional but less flashy Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg. The result was a full, highly produced sound that contained elements of Phil Spector's melodramatic work of the 1960s. Layers of guitar, layers of echo on the vocals, lots of keyboards, thunderous drums – Born to Run had a big sound, and Springsteen wrote big songs to match it. The overall theme of the album was similar to that of The E Street Shuffle; Springsteen was describing, and saying farewell to, a romanticized teenage street life. But where he had been affectionate, even humorous before, he was becoming increasingly bitter. If Springsteen had celebrated his dead-end kids on his first album and viewed them nostalgically on his second, on his third he seemed to despise their failure, perhaps because he was beginning to fear he was trapped himself. Nevertheless, he now felt removed, composing an updated West Side Story with spectacular music that owed more to Bernstein than to Berry. To call Born to Run overblown is to miss the point; Springsteen's precise intention is to blow things up, both in the sense of expanding them to gargantuan size and of exploding them. If The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle was an accidental miracle, Born to Run was an intentional masterpiece. It declared its own greatness with songs and a sound that lived up to Springsteen's promise, and though some thought it took itself too seriously, many found that exalting.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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DISC 4: DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN (1978)
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Coming three years and one extended court battle after Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town was highly anticipated. Some attributed the album's embattled tone to Bruce Springsteen's legal troubles, but it carried on from Born to Run, in which Springsteen had first begun to view his colorful cast of characters as "losers." On Darkness, he began to see them as the working class: his characters, some of whom he inhabited and sang for in the first person, had little and were in danger of losing even that. Their only hope for redemption lay in working harder, and their only escape lay in driving. Springsteen presented these hard truths in hard rock settings, the tracks paced by powerful drumming and searing guitar solos. Though not as heavily produced as Born to Run, Darkness was given a full-bodied sound; Springsteen's stories were becoming less heroic, but his musical style remained grand; the sound, and the conviction in his singing, added weight to songs like "Racing in the Street" and the title track, transforming the pathetic into the tragic. But despite the rock & roll fervor, Darkness was no easy listen, and it served notice that Springsteen was already willing to risk his popularity for his principles.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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DISCS 5 & 6: THE RIVER (1980)
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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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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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DISC 7: NEBRASKA (1982)
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There is an adage in the record business that a recording artist's demos of new songs often come off better than the more polished versions later worked up in a studio. But Bruce Springsteen was the first person to act on that theory, when he opted to release the demo versions of his latest songs, recorded with only acoustic or electric guitar, harmonica, and vocals, as his sixth album, Nebraska. It was really the content that dictated the approach, however. Nebraska's ten songs marked a departure for Springsteen, even as they took him farther down a road he had been traveling previously. Gradually, his songs had become darker and more pessimistic, and those on Nebraska marked a new low. They also found him branching out into better developed stories. The title track was a first-person account of the killing spree of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather. (It can't have been coincidental that the same story was told in director Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands, also used as a Springsteen song title.) That song set the tone for a series of portraits of small-time criminals, desperate people, and those who loved them. Just as the recordings were unpolished, the songs themselves didn't seem quite finished; sometimes the same line turned up in two songs. But that only served to unify the album. Within the difficult times, however, there was hope, especially as the album went on. "Open All Night" was a Chuck Berry-style rocker, and the album closed with "Reason to Believe," a song whose hard-luck verses were belied by the chorus – even if the singer couldn't understand what it was, "people find some reason to believe." Still, Nebraska was one of the most challenging albums ever released by a major star on a major record label.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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DISC 8: BORN IN THE U.S.A. (1984)
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Bruce Springsteen had become increasingly downcast as a songwriter during his recording career, and his pessimism bottomed out with Nebraska. But Born in the U.S.A., his popular triumph, which threw off seven Top Ten hits and became one of the best-selling albums of all time, trafficked in much the same struggle, albeit set to galloping rhythms and set off by chiming guitars. That the witless wonders of the Reagan regime attempted to co-opt the title track as an election-year campaign song wasn't so surprising: the verses described the disenfranchisement of a lower-class Vietnam vet, and the chorus was intended to be angry, but it came off as anthemic. Then, too, Springsteen had softened his message with nostalgia and sentimentality, and those are always crowd-pleasers. "Glory Days" may have employed Springsteen's trademark disaffection, yet it came across as a couch potato's drunken lament. But more than anything else, Born in the U.S.A. marked the first time that Springsteen's characters really seemed to relish the fight and to have something to fight for. They were not defeated ("No Surrender"), and they had friendship ("Bobby Jean") and family ("My Hometown") to defend. The restless hero of "Dancing in the Dark" even pledged himself in the face of futility, and for Springsteen, that was a step. The "romantic young boys" of his first two albums, chastened by "the working life" encountered on his third, fourth, and fifth albums and having faced the despair of his sixth, were still alive on this, his seventh, with their sense of humor and their determination intact. Born in the U.S.A. was their apotheosis, the place where they renewed their commitment and where Springsteen remembered that he was a rock & roll star, which is how a vastly increased public was happy to treat him.

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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Bruce Springsteen - The Album Collection Vol.1, 1973-1984 {8CD Box Set Columbia 88875014142 rel 2014}

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