Happy New Year, everyone, and many thanks for all your responses to the Bruce Springsteen and Favourite Albums Of The Year blogs I posted just before Christmas. Following some of your advice, I had a good listen to "Born To Run" and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" while cruising the North Nottinghamshire badlands and so forth over the holidays. And while I don't think they quite compare with the euphoric thickness of the live show (I'm stunned by Tim's suggestion that the O2 gig was a relative off night), I am beginning to get the point. One revelation was "Racing In The Street", which struck me as being exactly what I imagined Springsteen was like, but somehow more tender and nuanced; all the epic romance and finely-tuned cliche given much more humanity and gravity than I thought possible. Another was "Adam Raised A Cain", which was, on the other hand, nothing quite like what I expected of Springsteen - much more ragged and grungy, and deeply pleasing for that. Listening to "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", meanwhile, I was struck by an affinity with one of my favourite bands, Dexy's Midnight Runners. Not just in the vigorous, Staxy horn section, but in that weird conceit, so prevalent in whiteboy soul - I'm thinking of Van Morrison here too - of fanatically self-conscious "passion". On paper, it always looks pretty constipated and excruciating, but Springsteen, like Kevin Rowland, somehow pulls it off. Anyway, besides Springsteen, my Christmas listening was fixed mainly on those first four Michael Rother solo reissues that turned up at the end of last year, and the start of my further explorations of the Ethiopiques catalogue; "Volume 7: Mahmoud Ahmed". Ahmed is terrific, with the persistent grooves that make so much of this Ethiopian funk so compelling, coupled with a melodious wail that seems - to my semi-tutored ears - a little more North African than some of his contemporaries (though I haven't heard the records in years, the memory of some late '80s and early '90s Rai spring to mind, maybe Cheb Khalid specifically). I'm slightly embarrassed that I've never investigated the Rother albums before, since the first two especially - that's "Flammende Herzen" and "Sterntaler" - seem a logical continuation of the Neu! motorik. I guess Klaus Dinger's volatility is missing - this is more streamlined than ever, and Can's Jaki Liebezeit mainly reins in his more octopoidal rhythmic tendencies. But I love how Rother mixes that familiar motorway guitar strafe with some twanging classicism that calls to mind The Ventures and takes these two lovely albums out of the Krautrock experimental sector and into a broader rock'n'roll continuum. Works on the A1 for me. Finally, thanks again for all those Best Ofs. I should point out that I reviewed - and liked - something like 150 albums on this blog in 2007, so their absence from my Top 20 - like, say, Devendra Banhart's misunderstood and underrated "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon" - is hardly evidence of me disliking them. Good to see we share many highlights and prejudices, though one thing that's baffling me a bit is the massive support for "Boxer" and The National. They always struck me as a pretty corny stab at the bohemian and the literate, set to some ponderous foursquare music, and most of their supporters at Uncut seemed to prefer "Alligator". But, as you can see, at our continuing Best Albums Of The Year vote, "Boxer" is doing great. Just don't ask me to try re-evaluating it in 2008. Plenty more to be getting on with, and the new Stephen Malkmus album just arrived. Onwards!

It is, I guess, a quintessential Bruce moment. The house lights are on, and as I walk across the floor of the O2 Arena, everyone is bellowing along unself-consciously to “Born To Run”. For the best part of two and a half hours, the E Street Band have played with a thickness, a relentlessness, a charged virtuosity that is pretty astounding. Now, they’re peaking, and it seems conceivable that they could keep going all night. To a lot of you, I imagine, none of this is news. But somehow, I’ve managed to fluke my way into the Deputy Editor’s chair at Uncut in spite of never having seen a Bruce Springsteen gig. In spite, furthermore, of not ever having liked Springsteen a great deal, if truth be told. But over the past year or two, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that those ‘70s albums stacked up on my shelves might actually be worth playing. I’ve found myself infatuated with The Hold Steady, and generally impressed by the Arcade Fire, while realising that both bands are almost comically indebted to Springsteen. And finally, I’ve been playing “Magic” to death for the past few months; finally invigorated by this thunderous music. You’ll have to excuse me, then, for not having much in the way of critical objectivity today. I am, frankly, hopelessly unqualified to write a proper review of last night’s Springsteen show. Instead, I figure that this must be something of a personal epiphany, and an attempt to try and work out why his music suddenly makes sense to me. My hunch, as I’m transfixed by a bunch of bold, shamelessly epic songs from “Magic” – chiefly “Long Walk Home”, “Devil’s Arcade” and a fabulous “Gypsy Biker” with Springsteen and Miami Steve Van Zandt facing each other off with needling, high-end solos – is that what I like about Springsteen is the big pop imperative. It’s not the rocking – although his band are incredibly well-drilled at doing just that. It’s certainly not the horny-handed son-of-the-soil stuff, the earnest, rootsy singer-songwriter vibes that have sired so much boring Americana over the years – although, again, “Reason To Believe” sounds brilliant tonight. I think what I love here – and about “Magic” – is that, while there’s real serious substance to the songs, there’s a brassy showiness to the whole thing, wired into a very pop, swinging tradition. From the moment a fairground calliope parps into action to signal the arrival of the E Street Band, it’s the gaudy melodrama which I find so gripping, not the long-vaunted honesty and passion. Increasingly, the whole myth of authenticity bugs me as bogus and irrelevant, particularly when it’s applied to artists like Springsteen. There’s no doubting his integrity, but what is most impressive is the workrate, the thrilling choreography, the sweat-soaked revitalisation of Phil Spector’s pop masterplan. Springsteen doesn’t talk much tonight – there are no long soliloquies, just some rote bellowing and a couple of brief anti-Bush homilies that are virtually word-for-word identical to the ones Andrew Mueller reported in his thought-provoking piece on the Mid-West leg of the tour in the current issue of Uncut (one of the very best things we’ve printed in 2007, I think). We can invest any amount of meaning into these songs I’ll be learning over the next couple of weeks – “Racing In The Street”, “Night”, “Waitin’ On A Sunny Day”. But tonight, they’re not stadium rock so much as rock’n’roll theatre, right down to the fatherly nods of admiration Springsteen bestows on Clarence Clemons, Soozie Tyrell, Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren whenever one of them steps up for a brief, meticulous, rousing solo. Not fraudulent, but certainly knowing. The bandmember I’m most taken with, though, is Max Weinberg: as I watch him play erectly, with a sort of effortless force, all mighty forearms, I finally understand why an old boss – a drummer, actually – used to revere him so much. Like his bandmates, Weinberg seems to conjure up a vigorous spirit of community and celebration, but does so with a fearsome professional rigour. What else should I mention? A rousing “American Land”, with two accordions. And finally “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town”, delivered in Santa hats, with Van Zandt destroying his Sopranos credibility with some magnificently goofy earmuffs. Why? Because it’s just entertainment, folks, and now I get it - apart from "Dancing In The Dark", mind. If anyone would like to file a responsible and more measured review, please do below, and also: where should I start on my hilariously belated voyage of discovery? I’m thinking “Darkness On The Edge Of Town” but, as ever, any advice would be great.

A few weeks, maybe months ago, someone left a note after one of my blogs with some insider knowledge about the next Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds LP. It was, they suggested, the most direct pop album that Cave had ever made: after the Stoogesy ramalams of Grinderman and the meditative western soundtracks, here, apparently, was the workaholic Cave at his most focused and dynamic. I’ve been living with “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” for a while now, and in a way that gossip was right. But this is one of those curious records that initially appear immediate, but which only become genuinely compelling after multiple listens. It’s bony, dispassionate, far from the confessional intensity of, say, “The Boatman’s Call”, and, in spite of the title, with less religious brow-furrowing than usual. Two things stand out. One, it’s really funny. Two, it’s really groovy. If there’s a Cave album it reminds me of right now, it’s “Let Love In”, and chiefly the “Harlem Shuffle” vibes of “Red Right Hand”. That’s how it begins with the title track, and continues for most of the record – with a sinewy, dusty and happily malign take on funk. Martyn Casey’s bass often seems to be the dominant instrument (especially on “Today’s Lesson”), and a lot of the other Bad Seeds seem to squirt and explode in and out of a capacious mix. There’s a lot of economy and ideas in the playing here – it’s only rarely that you get a sense of the massed thunder of The Bad Seeds all clattering away at once. On the quite wonderful “Moonland” (a tense and beautiful rethink of a bunch of clichés involving cars, stars, snow, pensive time alone, and a whispering DJ on the radio), the low-slung atmospherics are punctuated by this weird, tight little drum rolls. On “Hold On To Yourself”, Warren Ellis’ violin flits in and out in the background like a bee swarm. Ellis seems to have taken over as Cave’s de facto musical director from Mick Harvey, though his fiddle is sparingly used. Instead, he meticulously organises guitars that creak like rusted hinges, and bluesy drum loops (on “Night Of The Lotus Eaters”) that could even have wandered off an early Beck record. The feel is still distinctly Cave-esque, though, since the open spaces allow the singer to squeeze in more words than ever. There’s a rollicking, picaresque feel to plenty of these songs (the title track, “Albert Goes West”, the litany of girls he’s loved before in the traditionally lengthy, verbose, Dylanish closer, “More News From Nowhere”), accentuated by the blokey choruses provided by the Bad Seeds. Much like the Grinderman set, Cave still has that stentorian gravity of legend, but his enjoyment in all this is much more open now. This comes to a head in “We Call Upon The Author”, a particularly gripping ramalam which finds Cave strenuously parodying himself as a beat poet and arbiter of staunch bohemian values in a world gone bad, or at the very least facile. “Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets,” he raves, hilariously, then yells, “Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!” He coins a couple of new verbs, to guru and to mediocre, exclaims “Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!” (which’ll definitely please Craig Finn) and lets a dying author pronounce, “Everything is banal and jejune”. It’s a genuinely funny, seriously erudite visitation of Grumpy Old Men. And it rocks, of course. Only once, I think, do we spot much personal detail. “Jesus Of The Moon” is one of those bruised and rueful ballads like “Rock Of Gibraltar”, in which latterday Cave grapples with the value – and the sometimes tricky realities – of a long-term emotional commitment. It’s here that he seems to come upon a manifesto for “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” itself: “People often talk about being scared of change, but I’m more afraid of things staying the same,” he sings. “Cause the game is never won, By standing in any one place for too long.”

A couple of things that have been hanging around for a few weeks now, and deserve some love here. One is “Rosemarie”, the debut album by an authentically fragrant Cornish band of Pre-Raphaelite damsels and dazed troubadours called Thistletown. Give me any excuse, and I’ll go into a comically apoplectic rant about the uselessness of most contemporary British bands who style themselves as acid-folk. As usual, I suppose, it’s my inbuilt bias to American music – even when it’s interpreting British forms. But Thistletown are pretty good, even though the album has been produced - quite beautifully, I have to say - by Michael Tyack, leader of quite possibly the very worst comedy fol-de-rol merchants, Circulus (who always remind me, grimly, of The Amazing Blondel). Reading their biog, it’s easy to imagine Thistletown are as self-conscious an operation as Circulus, given that it involves winsome maidens, houseboats, homegrown vegetables, wandering drummers and so on. In truth though, their music is so willowy and harmonious, it serves to make all the rustic utopianism of the backstory sound highly appealing. If you’re looking for an old English comparison, Trees are probably the best. But it’s Philadelphia’s Espers who Thistletown most resemble, though with less of a witchy edge. The title track is especially lovely, pitched somewhere between motorik and jig, though I must say it’s pretty hard to write about accurately while AC/DC are playing on the stereo. Strange day here today, since our production editor received “Tracks’n’Grooves” by Cliff Richard in the post and tried to convince us (and himself, briefly) that it was Cliff’s “breaks” album. But I digress. The other thing I wanted to mention today was a new recording of Gavin Bryars’ “The Sinking Of The Titanic”. Bryars is a favourite composer of mine, ever since I came across the Tom Waits-augmented version of “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” (ostensibly a tramp singing on a loop for an hour, augmented by Bryars’ gentle backgrounds and, in this case, a suitably ragged harmony from Waits). I saw a performance of “Titanic” years ago; wherein Bryars’ ebbing, super-slow orchestral minimalism was accompanied by a neon tube turning, over the course of an hour, from horizontal to vertical. This treatment is more layered and detailed than the one I have. It’s by Bryars (on double bass), an Italian ensemble called Alter Ego, and the sound artist Philip Jeck on turntables. Jeck is pretty interesting in a Christian Marclay kind of way, and it’s he who initially seems to dominate, prefacing the piece with a lot of staticky atmospherics. It creates a dusty rather than strictly damp atmosphere, but the ghostly ambience is striking, and when Alter Ego’s strings gradually come into focus, the effect is of something sombre and massive – a doomed ship, let’s say – emerging from the mist. Perfect.