"Ryan Adams - Rock 'N' Roll"

A lot of critics complain that Ryan Adams releases too many albums. The man thinks nothing of cranking out two albums a year, and that's really not even all the material he recorded even. The man writes songs in an effortless way, as though not getting these ideas out would be painful to him.

And critics complain. His label complains, mostly because he keeps coming up with stuff that they think doesn't fit their target demographic. Mostly, they all complain because he's just releasing too many albums.

Which is ridiculous, really--back in the early '60s, artists thought nothing of releasing a couple of albums per year, and sometimes more. Look at the Beatles--they cranked out 13 albums in the space of 7 years. In 1967, they released Sgt. Pepper's and Magical Mystery Tour, arguably their two most complex albums, and no one batted an eye--no, rather, folks were excited about getting another Beatles album.

But people have gotten used to bands waiting years in between albums now. A band could wait three, four, five years between releases, and no one would bat an eye. It's ironic that in this day of such short pop stardom and even shorter audience attention spans, artists are willing (or have) to wait so long in between albums. But Ryan Adams refuses to wait, and so he puts out albums as often as he can convince his label to let him.

Rock 'N' Roll came out late in 2003, the stop-gap emergency replacement of Adams' mope-rock homage Love is Hell. Rock 'N' Roll is his take on garage and indie rock, and he yelps, growls, and rocks his way through fourteen songs here. This isn't really the sort of album his label, Lost Highway, was expecting out of him (of course, neither was Love is Hell). I mean, this was the alt-country badboy behind Whiskeytown. That was the sort of music he was supposed to be making. But Jeff Tweey and Wilco never stuck to playing the same ol' same ol', so Ryan Adams decided he didn't have to, either.

Really, Rock 'N' Roll isn't a bad album, per se. It's full of throw-away phrases and even entire songs, but they ahve a charm all their own. This is a glam-filled look at disposable rock, at songs that are meant to thrash about and make a lot of noise for three or four minutes, then it's on to the next. The album has been criticized for having the form but not the substance, and I think that rather misses the point--this is about the style, not about making some powerful statement. It's a genre exercise, just as Love is Hell is a genre exercise. Rock 'N' Roll works fairly well in that regard, but it's not a particularly memorable album. It's fun while it's spinning, but afterwards, you have the urge to put on something like Whiskeytown's Pneumonia and remind yourself of what Adams sounds like when he's making music with heart rather than aping someone else's schtick.

Ultimately, that's what makes Rock 'N' Roll less than it could be--not the lack of substance (hell, 90% of all rock and roll lacks substance beyond "hey baby, wanna go back to my place and have dirty monkey sex?"), but the sense that Adams is consciously trying to sound like other people. Even in copying other people's styles, he's really only getting the form rather than the substance of the actual music. He's missing what makes those styles interesting and just mimicking the surface sound. This makes for a fun, shallow record, but not for a great one. On the few songs where Adams seems to forget his pretensions and actually gets involved in the music, it's actually quite good--he's still a consumate musician and songcrafter, and he has passion when he lets himself go. It's just that, for too much of the album, he doesn't.

On the other hand, the album he has coming out on Tuesday, Cold Roses, is a return to alt-country form, making the previous two or three albums feel like a strange divergence. The new double-record is available from Adams' website as a free streaming audio, and I recommend it very highly. Adams actually sounds like he's involved in the music rather than going through motions, and that's good news for everyone.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Ryan Adams, "1974"