Various Artists: Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

Released in the early days of the Reagan administration, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska served as a 10-song reminder that morning in America didn't stretch all the way across the land. With the pending change of administration coming on the heels of election rhetoric that talked of a booming economy as if everyone were lighting cigars with $100 bills, now seems like a good time for a refresher course in hard times. Badlands features 13 covers of Nebraska's songs—the original 10 plus three intended for the album—and while there's no arguing with the material, the good intentions, or even many of the performances, it can't help but sound disjointed. Originally intended as a set of demos and consistent in its spare, stripped-down sound, Nebraska offered a haunting series of portraits of broken lives and lost hopes that found its most potent image of hope in a man poking a dead dog with a stick. Though Springsteen's songs lend themselves easily to new interpretations, covering the album as a whole only serves as a reminder of how well the original worked, and how well it hung together as a piece. Given the unenviable task of covering "My Father's House," perhaps the most emotionally raw moment of Springsteen's career, Ben Harper emerges with a version that could be generously described as polite, in the process illustrating Badlands' fatal flaw. The original hovers like a ghost over this tribute, which can't shake it whether its re-workings are radical (Hank Williams III's country-stomp "Atlantic City") or faithful (Los Lobos' "Johnny 99"). Both sound fine, as do most tracks—particularly Johnny Cash's "I'm On Fire" and Damien Jurado and Rose Thomas' "Wages Of Sin"—but the project's whole-to-sum-of-its-parts ratio leans heavily to one side.