Most notably, Brendan O'Brien has done production for KoRn, Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, Train, Stone Temple Pilots, Incubus, Rage Against the Machine, and Bruce Springsteen. "Dependable" doesn't even touch dude's reality: O'Brien is capably bland, an amalgam of everything lucrative, efficient, and horribly uninteresting in Top 40 studio practice -- for most bands his presence is both overbearing and superfluous (like the Albini of nu-metal) and that works, but for the Boss he's a damning liability. O'Brien's hunkered over icons before and Mirror Ball (1995) was fine, but Magic marks the beginning of a new era in dad-grunge. Incipient AOR, all cruddy sounding and louder than ever.

While Devils & Dust (2005) benefited most from a rustic charm, spare in trite vignettes and the Everyman sympathy that allied the whole country to his kerchief, the album seemed still a grim exploitation of the battered innocence of Nebraska (1982). Epecially after The Rising (2002) cast Bruce as mannered Man of Steel and Six O'clock Shadow, too heroic to be grizzled, too sopping with uplift to be wrong. Which goes to say that Magic may be the final piece in O'Brien's sinister plan to manipulate the iconographic Springsteen, to render that New Jersey mug into marble, as if everything before were nothing but experimental tabulae rasae. The Boss is Now, he declares: warm, proud, worn, and vital like the USA should be.

Such selective memory could posture Springsteen's fifteenth proper album as some sort of return; to rock, to form, to the E Street Band and glistening urban send-ups are anyone's guess. But past the hurried, impersonal way in which Bruce's band gathered, as their schedules allowed, each song carries the weight of so much prototypical expectation that each rehashes insular cues internally, much like punching oneself in the stomach because one is pretty accomplished at punching oneself in the stomach, which all came about because one secretly hates and wants to hurt oneself. And since O'Brien has symbolically clipped the Boss's canon into post-9/11 uber-poignance, the cuts least sterile -- "Your Own Worst Enemy" stained and shamed by glam or the gothic blues and swamp toms of the title track -- are those that sound most like contemporary, younger bands and artists that are de facto progenitors of Springsteen left around and vocal enough to establish their idol as dictator of rock. "Magic" is all regrettably somber Damien Jurado, M. Ward, and David Bazan while "Enemy," not only bearing frightening resemblance to a chord progression in the They Might Be Giants song of the same name, if backwards, slips nicely into charity show fodder for the Arcade Fire or the Holy Steady, meaty fanfare with a deft didactic prod at the tail end.

Meanwhile, the plot thins, Magic manages to creep into a flat din, and tact is lost to nostalgia. "Gypsy Biker" shuffles responsibly, brutalizing poor harmonica interludes while barely able to scratch the surface of its anthemic debts; "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" tries out an interesting chrome tinge to the vocals, but the rest is tragic, as sadly fused to Born in the U.S.A. (1984) as single "Radio Nowhere," only with the additional cruelty of emulating Don Henley couplets and brimming with the same naïvete that makes the Eagles suck so hard. The album is just plain, unrelentingly stagnant, Planet Earth (2007)-baffling so desperate for mutant pop cultural permanence that I can't help but zip through a frustrating tirade and blame the turd on the highfalutin producer douche that probably doesn't know where I live.