Ryan Adams – Ryan Adams
Much could be made of Ryan Adams' first album in three years sounding, accordingly, his most focused since 2005's underestimated tone poem, 29. Arriving still not long after getting his Ménière's disease under control, marrying, and leaving behind the days of hard drink and harder else besides, its cracked-veneer vocals and lax electrics are barely embellished: on My Wrecking Ball, a pale aura of organ mists the lilting, one-line chorus, and Let Go rides out on a gentle interplay of slide guitar and pillowed, pedalled bar piano, but there's nothing further in the dressing-up box. These are 11 tracks of straightforward rock intent and renewed melodic discipline.
Longtime fans will find much that prickles the senses in what is a lightly nostalgic listen – not because the material itself is morose or inward-looking (it's actually a broadly optimistic LP), but because sonically it whiskers past many old-time Ryans, gives 'em a fond wave. The album's two rabble-rousers, Gimme Something Good and Trouble, conjure the dashboard sunsets and panoramic, dustbowl guitars of Demolition's rougher cuts (ref. Nuclear, Starting To Hurt or Gimme A Sign), while Feels Like Fire's small-town howl (“Just so you know, you will always be the hardest thing I will let go, drivin' past your church and all the houses in a row”) recalls the yearning of Cold Roses, though without that record's pervasive, metallic tang of pain.
Shadows' slack-stringed, indigo shading even briefly recalls the empty ballparks and long night drives of Avalanche or The Shadowlands from Love Is Hell. These are the softest of nods, however – Ryan Adams is not a return to any of these times, confident instead in rattling around the sunnily lit space that the artist's own airy production affords it (the record has a refreshing brightness after several years of the Cardinals' normalised AM-radio matte, which would often leave songs sounding punched flat).
A concise collection of breezy, unbrushed pop songs, then? Maybe, but we'd be fooled to think he's left his days of promiscuous demoing, b-sides and side projects behind – also recently landed is the 1984 EP, an intentionally offhand, twenty-minute punk-rock tantrum that paints a very different picture to whatever Taylor Swift imagines five years later might've been like. Older and wiser perhaps, but with an undimmed sense of fun, Adams still runs circles 'round most pretenders to the country-rock throne.