Product Description
Rare Actual 1978 Japanese First Pressing Of The Fourth Bruce Springsteen Album! Vinyl & Cover Still In Top Condition. Includes Inner Sleeve, Plus Sheet Of Lyrics In English & 4-Page Insert With Lyrics & Notes In Japanese. Labels Are Clean.
Condition – Vinyl: NEAR MINT!
Condition – Cover: EXCELLENT!
If Born to Run was epic cinema, Darkness was brutal reality, its characters not dreaming of idealised escape as much as struggling against their circumstances. Features “Badlands”, “Adam Raised a Cain”, “Racing in the Street”, “Streets of Fire” and the gripping title track.
Japanese vinyl pressings are highly sought after by audiophiles and collectors, due to their premium sound quality and beautifully presented packaging. The sonic quality of Japanese records is regarded as the best in the world. No wonder all the original Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab records were pressed in Japan! The covers are printed on better quality heavy stock paper too. Near Mint condition original Japanese pressings are becoming scarcer ~ and therefore more collectable and valuable every year.
Side 1:
Badlands
Adam Raised A Cain
Something In The Night
Candy’s Room
Racing In The Street
Side 2:
The Promised Land
Factory
Streets Of Fire
Prove It All Night
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
AMG –
Darkness was no easy listen, and it served notice that Springsteen was already willing to risk his popularity for his principles. 4 ½ stars Coming three years and one extended court battle after Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town was highly anticipated. Some attributed the album’s embattled tone to Bruce Springsteen’s legal troubles, but it carried on from Born to Run, in which Springsteen had first begun to view his colorful cast of characters as “losers.” On Darkness, he began to see them as the working class: his characters, some of whom he inhabited and sang for in the first person, had little and were in danger of losing even that. Their only hope for redemption lay in working harder, and their only escape lay in driving. Springsteen presented these hard truths in hard rock settings, the tracks paced by powerful drumming and searing guitar solos. Though not as heavily produced as Born to Run, Darkness was given a full-bodied sound; Springsteen’s stories were becoming less heroic, but his musical style remained grand; the sound, and the conviction in his singing, added weight to songs like “Racing in the Street” and the title track, transforming the pathetic into the tragic. But despite the rock & roll fervor, Darkness was no easy listen, and it served notice that Springsteen was already willing to risk his popularity for his principles. 4 ½ stars