Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 21/12/05
Label: Lost Highway

Your heart sinks upon seeing the tracklisting: "Strawberry Wine", "Blue Sky Blues", "Carolina Rain", "Starlite Diner". Exactly the sort of tear in my beer / all shook down / tangled up in blue homilies that Ryan Adams can probably knock off between recording sessions and so frequently has. This, after all, is his third album of the year - recorded over 12 August days in 2004, and hot on the heels of "Jacksonville City Nights" and "Cold Roses".

Aside from an ill-received foray into new wave ("Rock N' Roll") and that 'mythical' Strokes covers album, Adams has been nothing if not consistent. And prolific. Equal parts Keef, Paul Westerberg and Gram Parsons, his career to date has frequently descended into one long c*ck-sucking exercise - fellating the mythology of the swaggering outlaw rocker, seemingly for the benefit of grizzled old men 25-years his senior.

Quality control has also been an issue. The promise of "Heartbreaker", his solo debut, now seems an awfully long time ago. The five years since have been marked by a rapid succession of albums related only by their increasing predictability. Adams' songwriting technique - once lauded to high heaven - has often descended into nothing more than riffing contrived clichés over a simple and endlessly repetitive chord sequence. A talent, not so much squandered as treading water.

Initially, "29" suggests no great departure. Nine tracks long, a song for every year before 30, it traces the singer's journey from a bummed-out punk ("loaded on ephedrine looking for downers and coke") to some sort of higher wisdom. As a thinly-veiled autobiography it should, by rights, collapse under the sheer weight of self-significance. And yet, for all his shameless pursuit of rock infamy, "29" is undoubtedly Ryan Adams' masterpiece. It's a truly great album. A song cycle about the passing of youth and the impossible finiteness of time; and one that combines literate grace with understated feeling. Indeed, this could be the first time we've ever heard his real voice.

Certainly, it appears that Ethan Johns role as producer was simply to set the tapes rolling at 3am and leave Adams to spill out both his guts and the contents of his diaries. Stark and mostly piano-led, the result is a muted howl of regret about growing older, loneliness and broken dreams. An anguished cry from the heart that should be subtitled, "The Unbearable Loneliness Of The Modern Day Bohemian." As he observes on the rollicking title track, a rumination on misspent youth, "Most of my friends are married and making them babies, to most of them I already died."

And if the execution is heartbreaking, lyrically it's a revelation. Approximately 24 couplets are worthy of mention, but the pick comes in the wee small hours lament of "Starlite Diner", which pretty much encapsulates the whole mood. "Is it possible to love someone too much? You bet, the drugs are in the safe and the clothes are on the couch, intertwined. But none of them are yours and all of them are mine."

At last Ryan Adams has made a record every bit as good as his heroes.

    by Adam Webb