A friend of mine has been posting a plethora of Ryan Adams videos in the past weeks. I've been watching them amiably and even liked some of the offerings. I am certainly well aware of Adams' reputation much more than I've ever listened to him. And with a career as prolific as his, it's hard to get started. But nonetheless, with a new album out, I thought now would be a good time as any to update my singer-songwriter iPod repertoire.Having said that. This album is SO fucking boring! I mean, so crazy dull that I don't exactly how to shit on it. This is simply not the same Ryan Adams that I have gotten in brief chunks in the past.
First of all, every song follows the same acoustic guitar verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus form. Even if I had some personal connection to the lyric: "kindness don't ask for much but an open mind" (I don't); I'd still wonder to myself why I needed to hear it four times with the same inflection with the same musical accompaniment. The songs don't build from anywhere to anything. They start, the etch-a-sketch pin follows the etch-a-sketch line, and then the song ends. A lot of dead space on that board.
There's also no value in these lyrics. I mean, he has a song using one of the biggest clichés ever with "Chains Of Love". He's also certainly concerned about growing old and not being the kid he once was. But his only ability to verbalize this comes in:
- "I'm lookin' through the rubble tryin' to find out who we were"
- "standing by the ocean like I'm frozen here in time"
- "Am I really who I was?"
- and simply enough in one song... "What am I?"
That song, "Save Me", is the one that offended me the most. His expressionless voice sings that he's in "so much pain" but never describes anything in the rest of the song that explains that. I have a 30 second audio clip of Aimee Mann farting and that, on a scale of artistic expression, is still halfway between this song and "Brahm's Lullaby" (1 of 5 stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment