Picking up right where he left off a year and a half ago, Bruce Springsteen's Working On A Dream feels like every bit the companion piece to his 2007 album Magic. And just as that album felt like it reduced the mighty E Street Band to nothing more than a bunch of unimportant, lifeless studio musicians, Working On A Dream suffers the same faux pas.

Don't get me wrong. Just like Magic, Working On A Dream has some fantastic numbers. "My Lucky Day" and the title track are so good you can't help but imagine what great staples those songs are gonna add to Springsteen's epic live concert performances (the latter track was performed to grand scale along with a choir during the Super Bowl halftime show to great effect last week). But as stated before, producer Brendan O' Brien who is making his fourth (and hopefully his last) album production job for The Boss gets below average marks for making the E Street Band sound like nothing more than a bunch of average joe's. And some of the arrangement and sequencing choices here are just headscratchers. You open the album with an eight-minute long track about a character named "Outlaw Pete" (really?) and make it sound exactly like Kiss's "I Was Made For Loving You" (REALLY?). I'm sorry, but I can't help but giggle and guffaw every time it comes on and I have to skip directly to track two.

Don't get me wrong, there are some truly memorable moments here that at least make Working On A Dream somewhat worth investing time in. The last two tracks are especially great. "The Last Carnival," which is dedicated to fallen E Street Band member Danny Federici who passed away last year is a fitting epitaph and "The Wrestler" is a fantastically understated song written for the movie of the same name and dare I say every bit as good as "Streets of Philadelphia," the song that won him the Oscar over a decade ago. Working On A Dream will definitely not go down as one of the best or most beloved Springsteen records, but it's still another fine record from The Boss that surely has some great moments.