Bruce Springsteen - Darkness On the Edge of Town (Top 500 Countdown Update)

This album is so wonderfully dark and angry it's hard not to like it. But what makes this album so good is the fact that Springsteen has made an obvious shift in not only his lyrics, but also in his musical approach. Every great pop musical artist has to mature and age with his/her audience and this album is part of Springsteen's maturing. It is especially important because it comes on the heels of his big breakthrough album Born to Run. On Darkness he's beginning to play around much more with a harder rock sound that works perfectly with his darker lyrics. This rock sound will continue to develop on The River and blossom perfectly for Born In the USA. But the real strengths of the album are the lyrics and the fact that there really isn't a wasted moment on the album. These are very tight songs and songs that are starting to become much more direct in their approach to the stories being told. For a transitional album this is at a level well above what most other artists can produce and shows that there were probably more than legal reasons for the long delay between Born to Run and Darkness On the Edge of Town.