newcritics

Ryan Adams is perilously close to becoming the Lindsay Lohan of rock: a precocious talent, a prolific (but spotty) resume, a public burnout.

It doesn’t help that Adams, and once and future manager John Silva, are hyping Easy Tiger–Ryan’s nineth and newest album–as the North Carolina native’s “clean and sober” record complete with the artist reminiscing about “the ghosts of about 45 speedballs” to Anthony DeCurtis on the front page of the New York Times’ Sunday Arts & Leisure section. It’s the kind of hype that usually precedes the appearance of grainy telephoto shots of the artist smoking with his therapy group on the patio at Promises after the late night smash up of a German car.

Easy Tiger is certainly a cleaned-up Ryan Adams album. Gone are the production effects (though not all the vocal affectations) that seemed intentionally to obscure the lyrics and melodies on previous Adams records. The record is old-school short at 38 minutes, and it is the most deliberately producer-honed record Adams has made since his 2001 breakthrough Gold. With his contract at Universal’s Lost Highway set to expire, Adams could be accused of going careerist by those concerned about indie cred–cleaning up his life and reining in his creative excesses like a baseball player bearing down in a contract year (a particularly tough feat for a man who cranked out nine albums, one of them a two disk set, in seven years, with at least two additional albums rejected by his label).

Adams hasn’t delivered an A-Rod type MVP season. In fact, ahead of this one I’d take not only Gold but also Jacksonville City Lights (Adams’ excellent, tightly-crafted country record from 2005), Demolition (a superb but quirky 2002 collection of tunes from two aborted LPs rejected by Lost Highway), and Cold Roses (a sprawling, flawed but fascinating two CD set of originals that bear the distinct stamp of many hours spent listening to the Grateful Dead). I might even take Rock N Roll–a hastily written and recorded homage to 80s college radio rock with help from Billie Joe Armstrong and then girlfriend Parker Posey.

Still, as with any Adams album, Easy Tiger contains gems to be mined. The first is hiding in plain sight. Goodnight Rose opens the album in 3/4 time–a rollicking, mid tempo country rock lullaby set to a swelling sea chantey rhythm and decorated with gently surprising arrangement touches in the refrain. This is Adams at his best and opens the album at a highpoint the record never reaches again.

The Sun Also Sets reminds me of nothing so much as Into the Woods-era Steven Sondheim interrupted by a soaring folk rock refrain that would provide a perfect accompaniment to a love scene on Smallville or some other CW teen soap (”There it is, we are only one push from the nest/There it is, we are only one argument from deaf”). I find the shape of the melody original and fascinating, and the romantic teen angst refrain utterly irresistible. Oh My God, Whatever, Etc. is a soft folkie sstrummerthat would be no less at home on the CW. Rip Off manages to offer a fresh, plain spoken trope on the well worn theme of keeping it real in a relationship. And I can’t helped by be impressed by the rococo falsetto flourish that closes Two Hearts–half Morrissey, half Tiny Tim.

But Halloween Head, a mid-tempo arena rocker, is an example of the kind of artless drivel that new found sobriety can inspire (”I’ve got a Halloween head/ Head full of tricks and treats/ It leads me through the night time streets”). The single, Two,–featuring all but inaudible, generic background vocals from Sheryl Crow–is the kind of mawkish folkie emo that made Adams’ horrid Love is Hell and much of his debut album, Heartbreaker, hard listening despite a memorable melody (something entirely lacking from Love is Hell (Adams parodied it for De Curtis: ““Blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine/It takes two when it used to take one”). And I Taught Myself How to Grow Old, despite the nice melody, is pure self help speak, the kind of pablum for which we used to criticize the worst of the Laurel Canyon confessional singer songwriters in the 1970s.

Easy Tiger’s greatest virtue is its consistency of sound and style. To date Adams has been like a one man White Album, alternating between musical personalities, wrapping gems in a blanket of half decent songs, trial balloons, stylistic masquerades, and weird experiments, pouring out more music than is really expected. But since assembling his country-rock band, the Cardinals, in 2004 (and together drinking deeply from the well of the Dead for 2005’s Cold Roses), Adams has begun harvesting his influences. Once he wore his influences on his sleeve–audibly mimicking Elton John or the Allman Brothers or Neil Young or U2. Now, writing often with drummer Brad Humberto and sometimes all the other band members, a Ryan Adams style has come into focus–a country rock that resolves the tension between punk and the Dead (and the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Eagles) the way Hole’s Celebrity Skin resolved the tensions between punk and Rumors. If it resembles anything it’s a stripped down refinement of the lurching majesty of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review carried aloft on swelling pedal steel guitar (though the group is already on its third pedal steel player in as many years).

After feuding publicly with executives when they wouldn’t allow Adams to release three albums EVERY year, Adams’ is likely to find himself without a record deal this fall–after debuting at # 7 on the Billboard Hot 200, Easy Tiger fell to #31. For the past few years Adams has been posting songs to his multi-tiered, audio-navigable Web site including hip hop-influenced weirdness. To borrow a phrase from Willie Nelson (for whom Adams produced a record last year with the Cardinals backing-up), in the best of all possible world Adams would have a chance now to find himself, working again with Jamie Candiloro or some other producer to craft an album for another label, not just to spill new songs every which way. But what world Ryan Adams finds himself in next remains to be seen.