Well, I typically agree with the Washington Post's music reviews 95% of the time. I'm guessing they probably hit the nail on the head with this one.
Ryan Adams: So Much Music, So Little to Say
By Allison Stewart
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page C05
Even in a profession where behaving badly is part of the point, Ryan Adams impresses. In the years since he served as frontman for the alt-country Whiskeytown, Adams has devolved into a great, querulous cartoon of a rock star: a swinging, tormented baby Dylan or a determinedly loutish faux Gram Parsons or both, depending on how you look at it.
Adams is an alarmingly prolific issuer of double albums that should have been single ones, of side projects and demos and B-sides, all tossed into the marketplace with a heedlessness that suggests he doesn't know the difference between his greatest moments and his castoffs -- or worse, thinks there isn't one. His latest offerings, the simultaneously released EP "Love Is Hell, Pt. 1" and full-length "Rock N Roll," confirm his reputation as someone in need of a quick-witted producer or an off switch.
Many of the tracks on the spare, brooding "Love" were rejected by Adams's record company; "Rock N Roll" is the album he was subsequently instructed to make, and it's not necessarily the better of the two. To hear it is to be able to trace a map of Adams's interests: Echo and the Bunnymen, Paul Westerberg, the Smiths. Throaty, guitar-intensive and loud, sung in a wavery British accent, "Rock N Roll" is a rough-hewn new wave album with a garage-rock heart. With its jangly world-weariness, its debt to the Strokes (of whom Adams is so fond, he reportedly recorded a complete "Is This It" tribute album) is incalculable. Though "Rock N Roll" isn't without its charms (the only-partly-kidding "Note to Self: Don't Die" and the fine "This Is It" among them), it's ultimately little more than the sum of its influences.
Co-produced by famed Smiths compatriot John Porter, "Love Is Hell, Pt. 1" is equally derivative, though its sodden air of mournfulness lends it an authenticity "Rock N Roll" lacks. Top-loaded with strummy and meditative ballads (like the marvelous "This House Is Not for Sale"), "Love" is both moving and slight. It is a tribute to Adams's considerable gifts as a singer and interpreter that he can convert Oasis's turgid "Wonderwall" into a stripped-down thing of beauty, one of the few moments on either album that doesn't positively radiate self-consciousness.
Neither disc plays to Adams's strengths as a purveyor of brawny, country-rock-inspired ballads, and, more to the point, neither offers up any hint that Adams, who has careened from cowpunk to country-folk to garage rock to Brit pop, is willing to move beyond strenuous imitation of his influences -- alt-rock as Kabuki.
Since his remarkable solo debut, "Heartbreaker," each of Adams's albums has yielded up enough good moments to suggest his masterwork is right around the corner. By the time he sings (on the title track of "Love"), "I could be serious / But I am just kidding around / I could be anything / Nothing / Whatever, oh well" many listeners may already have given up. For the eternally hopeful, "Love Is Hell, Pt. 2" is due in early December.
