Review Summary: Ryan Adams is as Ryan Adams does.
At a little under three years, the gap between
Ryan Adams and 2011’s
Ashes & Fire is the longest wait for new material in the prodigious singer-songwriter’s career. While in earlier reviews of Ryan Adams’ material I have described his creative drive as helpfully providing “something for everyone,” or as an enviable ability to “take a s
hit and come up with a gem of a pop hook,”
Ryan Adams, strangely enough, makes me want more Ryan Adams. As an unabashed fan, this isn’t exactly a surprise, but this is an artist who has released fourteen albums in fourteen years, not counting his work with seminal alt-country outfit Whiskeytown and the innumerable side projects, shelved tapes and one-off collections Adams has amassed over the years. And it’s not so much that
Ryan Adams disappoints. As a more vibrant, better focused version of 2011’s
Ashes & Fire, it virtually perfects the dreamy, breezy alt-country Adams began concentrating on with the Cardinals and injects some strobe-lit rock revivalism a la the War on Drugs into the proceedings – essentially making this record an unqualified success in regards to some of the more tossed off experiments Adams has launched over the years.
No, where
Ryan Adams leaves me wanting more is in Adams himself, who seems more preternaturally at ease with himself and his music than at any other point in his career. Adams is on the verge of turning 40, and after successfully navigating a bout with Meniere’s disease, an inner ear disorder that threatened to derail his career, decades of reckless living, and a steady marriage to actress Mandy Moore, the lyrics here are perennially heartfelt, brooding meditations on growing older and melancholy relationship profiles like the forlorn “Kim.” It’s what you would expect to come from an artist at his stage of his career. That’s precisely what makes
Ryan Adams feel, for lack of a better word, safe – not the kind of adjective I would have used to describe a person who put out three distinctively unique records in the span of one year and once released a heavy metal sci-fi concept album in between two fairly unassuming Americana albums. At some point, you have to feel like Adams is engaging in a fair bit of self-censorship for reasons only known to him. He certainly hasn’t stopped producing at his usual profligate rate. Of the many Adams projects that have yet to see the light of day are a recent record produced with Glyn Johns that he poured $100,000 into;
Blackhole, an “epic” rock effort Adams has been mentioning in interviews since the mid-‘00s; various demo collections, including the
Love Is Hell-era drug trip
Darkbreaker; a goddamn mandolin cover of the Strokes
Is This It, etc. It’s ironic and a bit sad that perhaps the same critical backlash that tended to flow from Adams’ lack of a filter – something I have been guilty of in the past – may now be leading Adams to release records that could best be described as “Ryan Adams” records.
Ryan Adams is arguably the most “Ryan Adams” record yet, fittingly enough given its name. While press materials mentions the Smiths and the Cure,
Ryan Adams is far more heartland than midtown. The bubbling rage of “I Just Might” is vintage Springsteen; the confident strut of “Stay With Me” and the stadium-oriented riff of “Gimme Something Good” cribs from Petty, Adams’ anguished delivery and bleak vocal undertones nailing Petty’s inimitable blend of fervent arena rockers with frustrated emotions and turbulent relationships. When Adams hits on a good melody, his pristine guitar tones and distinctive vocal delivery elevate the material, as it does on the soaring “Feels Like Fire” and “Trouble,” a song with a beefy guitar line that would have sounded right at home on the best Cardinals records. Adams’ way around a hook, however, can’t always save the songs that tend towards the treacly (“Am I Safe”), the corny (“Gimme Something Good”), and the plain boring (“Tired Of Giving Up”). Part of this is the recycled air that has started to creep around the edges of Adams’ late-period work. Having tilled these same (admittedly verdant) fields since 2007’s
Easy Tiger, Adams occasionally steps into a puddle of shallow adult-contemporary tripe that even his incisive personality and increasingly tamed voice cannot save.
Those basic imitations of past great Adams tunes are few and far between on
Ryan Adams, particularly when weighed against some of his other recent albums, yet they signal a man well entrenched in his position and content to keep playing to his muse; not yet lazy, but perhaps getting there. That’s fine, of course – Adams can still knock out an effortless home run when he wants to, as he does on the brutally disarming acoustic “My Wrecking Ball” and the rousing “I Just Might,” still a genius heartbreaker all these years later. I’m content to wait for the next
Ryan Adams to come out, and I likely will enjoy it as much as I have this one, two or three years down the road. I hope, however, that the best and/or weirdest of Ryan Adams, what makes him such a compelling and fearless artist, will not be solely, sadly consigned to the Internet for the foreseeable future.
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