Music Reviews: Ryan Adams - Cardinology

CD Review: 'Cardinology' by Ryan Adams & the Cardinals

By Eric R. Danton on October 27, 2008 11:51 AM
Hartford Courant
http://www.courant.com/

In a year of momentous political change, there's a lot of focus on legacies, be they the potential doings of would-be statesmen or the chaotic leftovers of departing White House occupants. But never mind politics. Let's talk about Ryan Adams.

How will music listeners 20 or 30 years from now view the New York singer and songwriter? They'll have plenty of examples of his work: Adams, 33, is perhaps the most publicly prolific artist of his generation, having released 10 full-length solo albums since 2000, including "Cardinology" (Lost Highway), his latest with his band, the Cardinals.

Then there's "20:20," the as-yet unreleased boxed set said to comprise an additional five full-length albums. Add to that the three records he made with Whiskeytown, and a collection of tunes from the Finger, his trash-punk side project with Jesse Malin, and we're talking 19 albums since 1995. (Plus, Adams produced and played guitar on Malin's 2003 solo debut and produced a 2006 album by Willie Nelson.)

That's a tremendous outpouring of music. Not all of it is top-notch, of course, but there are more highs than lows, and a shocking amount of his material is flat-out brilliant: the deeply emotional songs on "Heartbreaker," the fractured country-rock of "Jacksonville City Nights" and tunes like "The Rescue Blues" and "La Cienega Just Smiled" from "Gold," and "Hallelujah" and "Dear Chicago" from the stylistic grab-bag b-sides album "Demolition."

It's possible, though, that Adams has only recently hit his stride -- a funny thing to say, given how much he's released. Yet his 2007 album "Easy Tiger" was his most focused and cohesive so far, and the one on which he sounded the most comfortable with himself. "Cardinology" is every bit as good on a dozen compact tunes in the same rootsy vein.

The songs are mostly built around acoustic and electric guitars, with flourishes from steel guitar and piano and even an Allman Bros.-style dual-guitar solo on "Like Yesterday." Adams adds a subtle vintage-soul touch via Memphis on a couple tunes, particularly with the hollow, coppery guitar lick on "Fix It" and the jangling chords and creeping Wurlitzer organ on the mournfully breezy "Let Us Down Easy."

There's a different kind of soul at work on the other songs. Adams has always excelled at wrenching relationship post-mortems, and he contributes some gems here. Bright, bristling electric guitar powers "Go Easy" as he muses on how often he still thinks about an ex, while terse acoustic guitar frames deeper heartache in his plaintive vocals on "Crossed Out Name."

With its poignant beauty and powerful songwriting, Adams' latest is, well, the latest in a string of ever-better sad-bastard records. In fact, with so much material to choose from, the most difficult task for future listeners considering his musical legacy may well be figuring out where to begin. "Cardinology" is as fine a place as any.


(Photo by Jon Graboff)

Ryan Adams - Cardinology

By Will Hermes
http://www.rollingstone.com/
October 30, 2008

Ryan Adams' drug problems and public tantrums have often overshadowed his music. But Cardinology may put an end to that. His first release in a year — notable for a guy who put out three (albeit spotty) full-lengths in 2005 — it's the record he has spent the past few years promising but never quite delivering. Drunk on melody, high on musical history, but all his own, the record throbs with great playing and singing, and thrums with hope without pimping easy platitudes. It's one of the best things he's ever done.

Cardinology is a classic-rock record to the bone, nodding to influences that Adams has conjured before but never so well: the country rock of the Grateful Dead and Gram Parsons, the arena anthems of U2. It begins with four killers in a row: "Born Into a Light" prays for faith amid troubles over a Tex-Mex melody, weepy pedal steel and gospel-tinged vocals; "Go Easy" is a breathless love pledge with heartland-rock hooks; "Fix It" is a plea for psychic repair that meshes a slithery R&B groove with a soaring Bono-style chorus; and "Magick" is pure mindless garage-rock pleasure, notwithstanding the geopolitical apocalypse lurking in its lyrics ("You're like a missile strike/Government goes underground/Warhead on legs/What goes around comes around"). Then things settle down a bit — but despite overcooked nautical metaphors on "Sink Ships," they never slack. Cardinology's riveting finale is "Stop," a fragile piano ballad sung in a shaky voice that slowly gains strength and takes flight. It's clearly about rehab, and while rehab rock may be a bit of an oxymoron, Adams — who has reportedly cleaned up — defines a genre here. If it helps undermine some of the bogus junkie myths about hard drugs and creativity, all the better.

Ryan Adams finds groove with band the Cardinals

Reuters/Billboard
October 25, 2008, 1:05 pm


NEW YORK (Billboard) - Ryan Adams' music is often overshadowed by his eccentric behavior and the pure volume of his recorded output. But on "Cardinology," due Tuesday , his songs take center stage.

In fact, the alt-country/rock singer-songwriter is so happy with the evolution of his band, the Cardinals, over the course of five albums in the past three years that he says he'd be content if his name was dropped entirely from the packaging. "The stuff we do communally is 10 times better than the stuff I come up with," he says.

Adams may be overstating things a little, and such comments should be taken with a grain of salt from a guy who moments earlier was going off on a tangent about '80s pop metal ("Hey, if Def Leppard started a cooking school, they'd be Chef Leppard!"). But there's no question the camaraderie he shares with guitarist Neal Casal, drummer Brad Pemberton, pedal steel player Jon Graboff and bassist Chris Feinstein has helped him create one of the most focused albums of his career.

On "Cardinology," which fulfills Adams' contract with Lost Highway, the label for which he has recorded since 2000, the artist details his battles with substance abuse and his struggles to sustain relationships with remarkable clarity, best heard on the anthemic "Cobwebs," the drumless "Crossed Out Name," the harmony-rich "Natural Ghost" ("You make me feel like I'm not here/But I am/More than you think I am") and the soft, Wilco-esque ballad "Evergreen."

"We did a really great record that sounds totally like the Cardinals," Adams says with pride. "It's pretty much live on the floor. I think we did it in a really brave way. We did it raw, like we were doing a gig."

ALL GROWN UP

Adams' newfound clarity is music to the ears of Lost Highway chairman Luke Lewis. "He's acting grown-up right now," he says with a laugh. "I kind of miss the petulant child occasionally."

Adams offers an amusingly unfiltered look into his life at Cardinology.com, where he posts everything from set lists and live clips to fan mail, rants about his favorite Sonic Youth albums and corny fake hip-hop songs he wrote on the tour bus while bored.

After a Halloween show at Harlem's Apollo Theatre, the band begins a short European tour Nov. 8 in Dublin. Eleven December dates opening for Oasis in North America will close out the year, with more headlining shows on tap for February.

With "Cardinology" ready to hit the market, Lewis is somewhat wistful about the likely end of his often rocky working relationship with Adams. The pair fought frequently over how much music Adams could -- or should -- release. Through it all, though, Lewis remained the musician's "biggest fan."

"We took some pretty harsh criticism for putting out so much music, but we could have put out more," he says. (In 2009, Lost Highway will issue an Adams anthology featuring several new songs.) "As much as we've tried to accommodate him by putting out a lot of records, a major-label deal is probably a bit restrictive for Ryan. My sense is he'd be better served by being independent, and by that I mean totally independent."

Indeed, Adams is already looking past "Cardinology" and dreaming about where he and his bandmates will go next. "S--t's going to get weird and awesome," he says. "Because we're into bands like Oasis and Foo Fighters : big, monolithic rock bands who really explore all those areas. That's what Cardinals is. That's the work I want to do."


Ryan Adams calls his own shots

BY JEFF MIERS
The Buffalo News Pop Music Critic
http://www.buffalonews.com/home/index.html
Updated: 10/24/08 11:19 AM

A few years back — 2005, to be exact — Ryan Adams brought his then-new band, the Cardinals, to the Town Ballroom for a highly anticipated show. At the time, Adams was the “it” boy, a critically lauded uber-auteur whose ability to compose and record new material by the truckload gave new heft to the term “prolific.”

Though he crept in on the red carpet rolled out for the ascendency of “alt-country” — something he helped push to the forefront as a member of Whiskeytown, and even more so with his solo debut, “Heartbreaker” — Adams was preparing to leave such genre definitions behind. His audience, however, didn’t seem to be ready for him to do so, and a backlash against Adams — who’d begun releasing a few albums a year, unlike anyone else in his peer group — was on the upswing.

The Town Ballroom gig found Adams and his band throwing caution (and audience expectations) to the wind. Adams on record was mostly about brevity and concision; he was essentially viewed as a hipster version of the singer-songwriter model, and as such, was expected to come out and play his songs, pretty much as they appeared on the albums those assembled had purchased, copied, digitally downloaded or just plain stolen.

This didn’t happen. Instead, Adams appeared with a big Gibson semi-hollow-body guitar, a pair of nerd specs perched on his nose, his hair a shock of Mad Scientist-like bed-head, and proceeded to lead the band through a three-hour set of songs mostly from the then-new “Cold Roses” double-album. That was bad enough for some. But then Adams and Co. proceeded to do something that the hipster base clearly felt was akin to switching parties mid-term: They jammed.

Oh, the humanity! Improvising, stretching out songs, indulging one’s musicianship and inviting the audience to come along for the trip — this is what jam bands did, not what the new breed of altcountry snob had in mind at all. About halfway through the Town Ballroom show, I began to feel as if I’d stumbled into a time warp, where a crowd of Sex Pistols and Clash fans had stumbled inadvertently into a Grateful Dead concert.

It was, in a word, awesome!

It should be acknowledged that Adams did seem to be out of it that night. His between-song banter was obtuse at best, downright nutty at worst. Whenever the music stopped and he was left to confront the assembled audience, he looked like he was unsure of where he was and why he was there. Adams appeared to be ill at ease. Some among the crowd suggested to me that this was simply a result of him being quite wasted.

I’m not so sure. Musically, the band was in amazing form, blending country, anthemic ’80s alternative, pop, rock and folk, producing a hybrid that echoed Neil Young, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, U2 and — horror of horrors! — the Grateful Dead. It seemed to me that Adams was going through a public birthing process and, naturally, this type of thing can be uncomfortable. It was clear, though, that Adams knew what he was doing.

Skeptics had their worst suspicions confirmed when, a short time after the Town Ballroom show, Adams turned up at the Bay Area Music Awards to jam with a whole bunch of hippies and jam-band types, among them, the Dead’s Phil Lesh. Last year’s “Easy Tiger” even pictured Adams and Lesh sharing a laugh in its liner notes. This was, again, awesome.

Having confounded expectations, gotten sober and managed to shed the strictures of his own skin, Adams now seems to be ready to make peace with his audience and his muse alike. On Wednesday, he began streaming his new album with the Cardinals, “Cardinology,” on the “social music discovery service” iLike. Visitors to the site could listen to the whole album, for free, as many times as they desired, for 48 hours. If they chose to preorder the “Cardinology” album — which gets its official release on Tuesday — they were given a download of one of its songs, “Fix It,” as well as a non-album bonus track. Adams is not the first artist to go this route by any means, but it’s a model that suits his restless artistic nature like a pair of spandex biker shorts.

It’s interesting to ponder what might’ve happened had this sort of technology been available to artists in the latter ’60s. Maybe Bob Dylan would’ve given his “followers” the virtual middle finger by “going electric” via the Web. Would “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” or “Penny Lane” have been made available as bonus tracks for Beatles fans eager to get a preview of a new Beatles album? Maybe the Stones could’ve made “Satanic Majesties” a bonus companion album available only as a download, which might’ve made it a much more palatable exercise in self-indulgence (and drug consumption). Who knows? The good news is, the very technology that sunk the music business in recent years is now beginning to be employed as a tool of expression and communication by the artists themselves. That’s cool.

None of this would matter much if “Cardinology” wasn’t such a fantastic Ryan Adams album. It certainly numbers among his best. And hearing it, legally, a week before its official release reminds me of being a preteen who’d stay awake late on school nights to listen to the “album hour,” when rock DJs would spin an entire new album before listeners could buy it.

It’s all starting to make sense again.•

jmiers@buffnews.com