“It ain’t rainin anymore”: A review of Ryan Adams’ Ashes and Fire

by Jeremy Griffin

If it seems like just a few months ago we were talking about Ryan Adams, that’s because we were. Dude comes out with an album like every other day. He’s the Woody Allen of the music world–only, Adams’ work is consistently, mind-bogglingly good (and yes, that’s an unnecessary but nonetheless justified jab at Mr. Allen; Vicky Cristina Barcelona was a load of crap–you know it, I know it, the world knows it).

Whereas his previous album III/IV showcased the songwriter’s bubbly indiepop side, Ashes and Fire finds Adams returning to the same soft, brooding, folksy aesthetic that made his first solo album Heartbreaker such a hit. It’s infuriating enough that he’s able to flip-flop so easily between styles (did you know that during his downtime in recording III/IV he wrote and produced a sci-fi metal album about interstellar warfare? Seriously. It’s called Orion, for chrissake), but even more infuriating is the fact that he does it so well.

The songs are unabashedly basic, stripped-down, raw; the instrumentation is minimal. Tunes like “Save Me” and “Kindness” are driven by simple melodic hooks that, while not necessarily jaw-dropping, offer just enough cleverness to hold your attention. Then you’ve got songs like ”Dirty Rain,” which resonates with rich, haunting  imagery that cleverly belies the song’s relaxed sound:

Last time I was here you were waiting/ You’re not waiting anymore

The windows broke and the smoke’s escaping/ a book’s scattered across the floor

and the church bells ringing through the sirens/ and your coat was full of bullet holes

Last time I was here you were waiting/ You ain’t waiting anymore.

But the real winner here is the title track “Ashes and Fire.” It’s a loping honky tonk number full of jangly guitar and a rowdy piano melody. Like all of the songs on the album, it is brief, uncomplicated, buzzing with images and ideas that refuse to coalesce into a single concept but instead demand that the listener interact, however briefly, in order to summon a “point.” And this, I think, is one of Adams’ largley unsung talents: his ability to craft songs that are both utterly simple and wonderfully complex. In the same way that Gram Parsons was able to get such economy from only a few chords, Adams’ work is pointedly straightforward, accessible, at least in terms of melody; the complexity arises from the listener’s interpretation: he isn’t interested in handing us just a lovelorn narrative like some of his alt country contemporaries. Rather, Adams offers us a bouquet of poetics, sometimes seemingly at random, in each song; what we do with it is up to us, but whatever we come up with is guaranteed to move us.

The Tao of Roots Rock

by Jeremy Griffin

I Recall Standing as Though Nothing Could Fall

by Matthew Ryan

Usually when I write a music review, I like to spend a week or so ahead of time listening to the album while I go about my daily routines–driving to work, washing dishes, etc. I’ve that found leaving it on in the background like this is the easiest way for me to absorb the content before penning the actual review.

However, this proved extremely difficult with Matthew Ryan’s I Recall Standing As Though Nothing Could Fall. Not because the album is bad–far from it. Like most of Ryan’s previous albums, I Recall Standing isn’t the kind of thing you can leave on in the background and forget about. It commands your attention with an unmistakable sense of purpose.

I Recall Standing, Ryan’s thirteenth album, finds the songwriter continuing to explore ways to merge his Nashville alt country sound with new wave electronica. The album is full of crystaline piano melodies, brooding fuzzed-out guitars, and twinkling synth beats, all of it brought together by Ryan’s distinctive voice, which teeters between a ghostly whisper and an all-out Tom Waits’ growl. There are moments of elegant fragility, like the violin-laden ”Song for a Friend,” and there are moments of cool, gritty bravado, like “All Hail the Kings of Trash.” In between, you’ve got a stellar collection of tunes from an artist that No Depression magazine once hailed as “the best singer-songwriter rock kinda thing to come around since Freedy Johnston’s Can You Fly?”

To call Ryan an activist songwriter might be a stretch, though the anti-war sentiment on I Recall Standing is as forceful as it has been on any of his albums. The most obvious instance of this is in “I Don’t Want a Third World War”:

Our darkness is catching up with us

We’re turning to cannibals

Darkness is catching up with us

We’re acting like animals

Look a child in the eye and say

What were you hoping for?

You shouldn’t expect too much

Look a child in the eye and say

What are you crying for? 

You should never expect too much from us

This is as close as one of Ryan’s songs comes to Not Working, mostly because of how strikingly direct it is; those familiar with his other albums know that the thrust of his songwriting talent lies in the poeticism of his lyrics, the way in which the seemingly disparate images in his lyrics speak to the complexity of human suffering. Of course, those folks probably also know that this isn’t saying much: in the big scheme of things, even Ryan’s near misses ring truer and more heartfelt than the top selections from some of his Nashville contemporaries’ catalogues.

I once asked Ryan in an interview to describe his songwriting process. He responded by explaining that there really wasn’t one; the songs crafted themselves. “It can get dangerously mystical talking about songwriting,” he said, ”but for me it’s a form of meditation.” Dangerously mystical. That seems like an oddly apt way to describe I Recall Standing, the way it grips your focus all the way through. A kind of hypnosis. You want a challenge? Put the album on and try not to listen. Just try.

Leave it to the experts, they know best: A review of the Damnwells’ No On Listens to the Band Anymore

by Jeremy Griffin

If you’re a fan of the Damnwells, then you can most likely appreciate their disdain for the recording industry (I won’t rehash the whole thing here, but check out our interview with the band’s singer/songwriter Alex Dezen for more some background info). And you probably know that since giving a well-deserved middle finger to said industry and subsequently assuming control of all aspects of their career—they gave their previous album One Last Century away for free on their website—that the quality of their music has skyrocketed.

This time around, the Brooklyn-based rock outfit, which at this point is mostly just Dezen himself, has turned to Pledge Music, a UK organization that finances music projects through fan donations. The result is unequivocally the best fucking collection of songs of the band’s career, and perhaps the best album so far of 2011.

NOLTTBA takes a bit of a step away from the band’s customary alt-country sound, inching closer to a more mainstream aesthetic. There’s a (very) slight plasticky cleanliness to the songs that could signal one of two things to the listener: that the band has gone soft, or more likely, that Dezen, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has become much more comfortable with himself as a songwriter.

Take, for instance, a song like “The Great Unknown,” which at first sounds like every this-is-gonna-get-me-laid anthem written by every liberal arts college freshman but then actually reveals itself as a kind of smirking parody of those very same kinds of tunes: “So I will drive you home/ though we’re both drunk and stoned/ just follow the stars and speeding red cars/ into the great unknown.” Leave it to the author(s) of “Assholes” to craft a genuinely moving ballad about drunk driving.

Then you’ve got ultra-catchy numbers numbers like “She Goes Around,” which flirts playfully with a sort of new wave groove and which more effectively demonstrates the band’s ability to merge muddy boots rock with the kind of hook-heavy pop that would make the fellows in Cheap Trick proud.

Dezen has always been a good lyricist, but on NOLTTBA he takes it a step further, packing the songs so full of rich imagery that at times the lyrics literally spill out over the rhythm, as in “Let’s Be Civilized”: “There’s a groom and a bride in my mind/ sending postcards of memories/ There’s a wicked witch/ suicide cigarettes and climbing trees.” Dezen has a wonderful Dylanesque ability to cull together all these quirky, disparate images into an elegant whole that, even in their most sarcastic moments, speak with more honesty than most traditional love songs.

The Damnwells is one of those bands you probably won’t ever see on MTV or the Grammys or the Superbowl Halftime Show. But you will hear about them, just not through the conventional channels. Because they’re not a conventional band. Music culture in America has dictated that signing with a major label and touring your brains out in a big bus and plowing Kardashian sisters is the end-all-be-all of rock stardom. The Damnwells, however, are one of a growing roster of bands to reject this ideal and to find out that they are actually better off for it.

‘Til Somebody Kills the Lights’: A review of Ryan Adams’ III/IV

by Jeremy Griffin

A while back, a friend and I were discussing whether or not Ryan Adams was overrated. My friend claimed that he was, his reasoning being that despite Adams’ extensive catalogue, and despite the fact that nearly all of his songs could be classified as “good,” he had yet to produce anything with any real staying power–nothing that might qualify as “great.” Whereas most of the truly great songwriters manage to generate at least a couple of signature songs—that is, songs that more or less emblemize the grandness of their talent, like Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done” or Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,”—Adams’ closest blush to this might have been “When the Stars Go Blue” off his album Gold—and even that was mostly the work of Tim McGraw, who covered the song on his second Greatest Hits album in 2006.

However, as I explained to my friend, this is the very same thing that I think makes Adams such a phenomenal songwriter. The key word here is good: given the volume of tunes that the thirty-six-year-old so breezily dashes off year after year, you’d think you’d be able to find one or two that fall short of the mark, but there hardly ever is. Moreover, this seems intentional. It is almost as if Adams is burdened by the understanding that a great song—and even a good one sometimes—can ruin a career just as easily as it can launch it (for example: Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a great song, and yet as the band has admitted, it also represented the beginning of their collective end).

So, okay, let me be completely upfront about this: I love everything Ryan Adams does. Everything. There was no chance I was not going to like this album. I would listen to the man read from the phonebook. Even his infamous phone message to rock critic Jim DeRogatis, in which Adams throws a tantrum befitting of a tween about DeRogatis’ review of one of his shows, is endearing in a way that I can’t quite figure out.

There was, however, some doubt as to how much I would like it. Because as any Adams’ fan will tell you, as prolific he may be, he has put out a few clunkers in the past (see: 2008’s Cardinology).

Fortunately, Adams appears to have come to terms with the schizoid nature of his music: III/IV plays like a greatest hits album, pulling from his impressive portfolio of styles. There are poppy, fuzzed-out tracks like “No” and “Kisses Start Wars,” which hearken back to the grungy musical aesthetic of Rock and Roll; there’s the elegantly somber “Ultraviolet Light,” which could pass as a B-side from Cold Roses; and then are tunes like “Star Wars,” whose jarring shifts between time signatures preclude it from any classification but, at the very least, make for a very interesting listening experience.

Is III/IV Adams’ best album yet? Not exactly, but it’s up there. In a way, he seems to have lost all concern for classification and marketing and genre, and the result is a spectacularly enjoyable album that tows the line between artistic conscientiousness and glitzy commercial appeal. Adams’ place in the music world is no place at all, that indefinable space between genres.

Most important, however, is how effortless the album seems. That most of his songs, particularly those on III/IV, feel as if they were crafted in under ten minutes is precisely what makes them so enjoyable: they’re good in spite of themselves. Even the less-than-spectacular tunes, the real dregs of his catalogue, outshine most of the capital-G “Great” songs cluttering up the charts. And I realize that I’m committing one of the cardinal sins of music reviewing here in that I’m gushing about the artist while commenting very little on the album in question, but I guess that’s sort of my point: it’s next to impossible to say anything true about Adams in the context of a single album in that each of albums represent only tiny niches of his songwriting abilities. There is a fleeting quality to his music, something pointedly unobtrusive, like a half-second-too-long glance from a stranger on the street, each song an anthem for the moment at which it’s played. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Adams isn’t partcularly interested in the future; rather, he’s interested in trying to capture some ephemeral aspect of the present.