Adam Granduciel has always admired Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen

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Adam Granduciel has always admired Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and he really, really wants to be like them. Who can blame him? Zimmy and the Boss are both irreducibly American, capable of writing deeply personal lyrics that nonetheless hold a mirror to the national consciousness and of breaking new ground sonically while remaining resolutely rooted in the rock n' roll tradition. So Granduciel affects Dylan's nasal whine and lilting diction at the same time that he attempts to replicate Springsteen's propulsive groove. For good measure, he conjures appropriately "epic", "American" imagery: a soldier with eyes like rings, a dream in danger of being "wasted", a "black sunrise". But Granduciel seems to have missed the fact that Dylan's messages were strengthened by his logophilia and surrealism and Springsteen's were deepened by his narrative mastery. He instead chooses to write every lyric in the first person and spew bromides like "Love’s the key to the games that we play" in an attempt to pass off anemic omphaloskepsis as vision. "I won't get lost inside it all", he promises, but it's too late.