However I have found a series of reviews and articles I wrote when we had a website and I was required to write something every week. Obviously this didn't last very long as there aren't that many, but between late 2003 and early 2005 I was a writer.
So while I wait to finish work and use my free time to do something inspiring, I will post some of these.
REVIEW: RYAN ADAMS - ROCK N ROLL
(written 10/10/2003)This Is It
Shallow
1974
Wish You Were Here
So Alive
Luminol
Burning Photographs
She's Lost Total Control
Note To Self: Don't Die
Rock N Roll
Anybody Wanna Take Me Home
Do Miss America
Boys The Drugs Not Working
Ryan Adams is a great rock star. He has been in band that split just before they would have become huge, he smokes, he is regularly drunk on stage, he has admitted to using a variety of drugs, he lives next to two of The Strokes and he has dated celebrities.
He also has public outbursts (a slanging match with Jack White through the music press) and has threatened to quit music on his message board (due to his record company supposedly rejecting his Love Is Hell album). But most of his outbursts come across via his records. On the title track of his new record, Rock N Roll, he references his threat to quit with the lines “Everybody’s cool playing rock n roll, I don’t feel cool, feel cool at all.” This song however, with its up tempo title, is the most melancholy, sonically, on the album. The rest listens like an eighties rock homage. And it is very rock n roll.
Opener This Is It seems like a direct response to the Love Is Hell debacle – “Don’t waste my time. This is it. This is really happening.” And with his reputation as the prolific songwriter extraordinaire, it is fitting that the entire album starts with the words “Let me sing a song for you that’s never been sung before”.
On his previous album, Gold, Adams aimed high with his songs. Touch, Feel And Lose was a blatant soul song, and Nobody Girl had a 5 minute guitar solo. This time around, he has not over exerted himself, but adds parts to the songs that take them to greater levels. Wish You Were Here could have been only an adequate song, but Adams vocals take off in the last thirty seconds. A snarl worthy of Liam Gallagher lifts both 1974 and Note To Self: Don’t Die, and a Morrissey like vocal on So Alive makes the song what the title suggests.
The great thing about Ryan Adams now, is that after the three different albums of Heartbreaker, Gold and Rock N Roll, you have no idea where he will go next. Rest assured, it won’t disappoint.
No comments:
Post a Comment