Therefore, one understands if Max, Clarence, Steve et al come tearing out of the traps with the harpyish indignation of mob wives who’ve only tolerated the man of the house’s philanderings in the belief that he’d never dare set up a second home with some fly-by-night floozie. If public and pundits alike embraced ‘We Shall Overcome’ as Springsteen’s finest work in years, the E Streeters have risen to the bait, sounding like they’ve hit the gym, invested in a whole new wardrobe and remade themselves as a lean, mean, throbbing-gristly machine, one buff enough to eschew endless studio slogs for a series of guerilla sessions in Atlanta’s Southern Tracks complex. Chiefly necessitated by drummer Max Weinberg’s Conan O’Brien commitments, this new regime – core band weekend shifts alternating with weekday overdub and vocal duties – has served the record well. These songs bristle with urgency and focus. E Street elements that might have seemed anachronistic in recent times (Clemons’s brass clarion calls, Roy Bittan’s ‘West Side Story’ arpeggios) now take on a bittersweet resonance.

The opener ‘Radio Nowhere’ is pitched exactly halfway between the open road romanticism of ‘Born To Run’ and the blacked out windscreens of ‘Darkness’, ‘Light Of Day’ written in the dead of night (“I was trying to find my way home/But all I heard was a drone/Bouncing off a satellite/Crushin’ the last lone American night”). Imagine REM’s ‘Drive’ jacked up to double speed and covered by The Wallflowers and you get some idea of the terrain. Clarence’s blasting sax later finds its echo in the harmonica wail of ‘Gypsy Biker’, where a lone roadhog is presented as the last Ford-like freebooter in an age of barcode branding. ‘Last To Die’ completes the turnpike trilogy and seems to snapshot a wearied, worried Sarah Connor squinting into the storm at the end of ‘Terminator’. The highway is still a metaphor for escape, except the chrome-plated chariot is now a station wagon with the kids asleep in the back seat and canned supplies stashed in the boot.

Mostly, ‘Magic’ is a big, beefy rock record full of unstoppable forces and immovable objects. ‘You’ll Be Comin’ Down’ sounds exactly like you’d want Bruce and the gang to sound in 2007: grizzled, embattled, bootheels worn down, but strangely steadfast. ‘I’ll Work For Your Love’ opens with Bittan’s ‘Jungleland’ glissandos before settling down as a pledge-of-allegiance love song enlaced with Biblical images (“I’ll watch the bones in your back/Like the Stations of the Cross”). By contrast, ‘Your Own Worst Enemy’ is downbeat but gorgeous, laden with ‘Pet Sounds’ pianos, Spector kettledrums and a wistful melody that sounds like a classic on first listen, while its twin, ‘Girls In Their Summer Clothes’, replays breezy August boardwalk evenings by way of swoonsome girl group airs, glockenspiel and Max’s patented big beat. But be warned; it’s not a playful record. The only lapse in intensity is ‘Livin’ In The Future’, one of those ‘Tenth Avenue Freezout’ type Motown homages with whistling Federici keys, knowingly corny key changes and “Na-na-na-na” refrain. Even the sleight-of-hand title tune sounds for all the world like one of Warren Zevon’s backhanded love songs set to a dark carnival backing of woozy fiddle and trilling mandolin, while ‘Long Walk Home’ is a dead cert houselights-on curtain closer for the forthcoming tour.

Credit where it’s due. Producer Brendan O’Brien, the missing linkman between roots-rock (Dylan, Neil Young, The Wallflowers) and garage grunge (Pearl Jam, RATM, The Offspring) has distinguished himself as an all-round sonic craftsman, A&R adviser and lieutenant to Bruce. The record may not contain any single key Springsteen anthem, but the cumulative effect is formidable: the material is uniformly strong, the band are playing with muscle and assurance, and the production is spot-on: no unwise world music monkeying, no ill-judged nods to whatever’s hip in the parlours of Connecticut lawyers. In short, this is the record many of us have wanted Bruce and the E Street Band to make for, oh, about 20 years now.

‘Magic’ is real. Can I get a hallelujah?

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.