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Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band have a couple of records coming out between now and the end of January. Yesterday saw the release of a new Greatest Hits album, exclusive to Wal-Mart, which differs from the 1995 Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits release in that any songs Springsteen performed without E Street are left off, replaced by songs from The Rising and Magic. And on January 27th, Springsteen’s newest studio album, Working on a Dream, will hit the racks–here, I’ll take a quick look at the tracklisting for that record and provide a little insight into what should be expected by fans picking up the record in two weeks.

Some of the silly, clunky lines and rhymes don’t stop “Outlaw Pete” from being an ambitious and catchy opening song. It sounds a lot like something you might find on Tunnel of Love, which is interesting when you consider that as the only great rock album he made without the E Street Band (Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust are all folk, in my book). There’s certainly an operatic quality to this song that’s reminiscent of “Rosalita” and “Jungleland,” and not only because it’s twice as long as any other track on the record.  The muddy, Phil Spector-inspired wall of guitars, organs and drums that roll through the last minute of the song are haunting and low-fi, giving the song an anthemic, classic-rock feel and leading nicely into the high-energy enthusiasm of “My Lucky Day.”  Already released as a single, this song put me off at first.  In the context of the record, though, the song seems less unconstrained in its enthusiasm and more ironic, taking on the tenor of “Better Days” from the Lucky Town album.

The album’s title track, “Working on a Dream,” is still a fairly air-headed but relentlessly catchy single destined to get more radio play than any track on the record, save for maybe the multi-award-winning “The Wrestler.” It’s uplifting in spite of its gloomy sound, kind of the karmic opposite of “Born in the USA” or “Glory Days,” and the rhythm section of the E Street Band really brings it.  While the drum part isn’t particularly complex, the way Tallent and Weinberg own this track may very well silence some of the critics who consistently pick on Max’s ability to keep up musically with the rest of the band.

“Queen of the Supermarket” was the musical highlight of the record for me; classic Springsteen, with desperate, down-and-out characters whose lives are given heightened relevance by the strength of their own skewed perspectives. This song, at a little over four minutes, feels just as epic as the eight-minute “Outlaw Pete” without the clumsy lyrical moments that plagued the record’s opener. This song also, as far as I can remember, is the first time Springsteen has ever used the F-word on an E Street record (it certainly sticks out here, whereas it was a little more at home in the dismal, quiet acoustic songs of the Devils and Dust record).

If there’s a track that feels more dated than any other on the record, it’s probably “What Love Can Do,” which sounds so much like “Counting on a Miracle” that it could easily have come off the cutting room floor from Springsteen’s sessions for The Rising. In fairness, though, The Rising was such a spectacular album that having a song feel “dated” because it sounds like it should have been on that record?  Not so bad.

Not so good, though, is “This Life.”  A serviceable enough track, the song is bogged down by an overlong ending that sounds a little bit like something the Beatles would have done while feeling particularly lazy.  As for the track itself, it sounds very much like something that should have been left off of Magic, and therein lies the major problem with “Working on a Dream”: Its tone is all over the place.  Springsteen, who has historically been a master of the concept album, seems to have just taken a bunch of songs he thought sounded good individually and dropped them onto a record together. It’s almost like a mix tape.

“Good Eye” is a stellar example; while “A Night With the Jersey Devil” has been left off of the official commercial release, “Good Eye” is about as close to a “traditional blues” approach as you’re likely to get from a mainstream rock hero, with the far-away microphone sound, heavy harmonica and muddy guitars. It’s unlike anything Springsteen has released on a studio album before, and feels a little lost on the record.  Maybe if “A Night With the Jersey Devil” had been included on the bonus tracks as it had originally been reported by Columbia, this song wouldn’t be as glaring…but that’s impossible to tell now.

“Tomorrow Never Knows” is an incessantly appealing song, sounding a bit like an E Street interpretation of the type of track that ordinarily would have been held over for Springsteen’s next solo, acoustic project (it almost sounds like “My Best Was Never Good Enough,” one of my favorite tracks from The Ghost of Tom Joad) and is over far too quickly at two minutes and change.

“Life Itself,” another highlight of the record and released last week as an Amazon-exclusive video, sounds a lot like something that could have been at home on The River or Tunnel of Love.  Mellow and lyrically complex, it’s everything that “My Lucky Day” is not.

“Kingdom of Days” is another song that clearly came out of the Magic sessions, as it sounds just like a number of the songs from that record–but at least this one sounds like it would have been good enough to make the album if not for timing or hard musical choices.  One thing that Springsteen does that feels like a concept record (which this is, as I’ve stated, really not) is to put this record at a point where you can start to feel the crecendo moving down and the wave breaking, so to speak.  From here on out, the record starts winding down–not necessarily in terms of quality but rather like Springsteen’s preparing the listeners to end their day of music-listening and writing things that are more like night; “Kingdom of Days” feels like the end of a long summer’s day.

Again falling into the trap of simplistic lyrics and pop sensibilities that just don’t feel worthy of Springsteen, “Surprise, Surprise” may be the worst song on the album simply because of its chorus in spite of a decent musical hook and fairly decent lyrics within the verse structure. The chorus (wherein Springsteen says “surprise” about seventy-four times) just takes too long and feels like a song that would run over the opening credits of a bad ’80s sitcom.

An apparent sequel to the fan-favorite “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” “The Last Carnival” is a great, acoustic song that brings echoes of Springsteen’s roots in a number of ways. For whatever reason, The Boss has always been at his best when he takes on circuses and carnivals, and this one has a rollicking feel that brings to mind “County Fair” even with an understated combination of lyrics and music that almost feel like something off The Ghost of Tom Joad.  Unwelcome here is a choir that sings incoherently–but at least quietly–throughout the bulk of the song and then breaks into its full incoherent glory after Springsteens’ vocal cuts out in the last few seconds.

“The Wrestler,” written for the film by the same name and having already taken home a number of “Best Song Written For a Movie” awards this year, probably doesn’t need little ol’ me to say it’s good, but it is; it’s wonderful, smart, compelling and lyrically interesting in a way that’s rare.  This one track would justify the purchase of most albums, and this one–in spite of a few misses–has a handful of other tracks to help justify even if this one isn’t “technically” part of the tracklist.