More often than not, Ryan Adams' prolificacy-- check the three full-length records he released in 2005 alone-- is snorted away as a feat of spectacular cockiness, worthy only of eye-rolls and disenchanted sighs. Adams' avalanching output certainly perverts common notions about art-as-pain, perplexing folks who think songwriting should be all clenched fists and bloody fingernails-- but no matter where you land on Adams' preposterous pacing, there's still something compelling (fearless, even) about the display.
Produced by Ethan Johns (who worked with Adams on 2000's Heartbreaker and 2001's Gold), 29 features nine songs, each of which portrays Adams, now 31, at a different year in his twenties. The album might be murky and inconsistent, but it's also an eerily apt encapsulation of country-trotting, post-collegiate confusion, and flitting relentlessly between styles, moods, cities, and fucked-up affairs. Scattered, slow-building, and occasionally soporific, 29 is also unfortunately easy to dismiss-- meaning naysayers will miss a handful of perfectly transcendent tracks.
Adams has never been particularly skilled at masking his influences, and opener "29" is a walloping reinterpretation of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'", with the same squished vocals (including the roll call of American locales), guitar noodles, and thump-thumping percussion. Adams may howl "singin'" instead of "truckin,'" but the sentiment and the sound remain the same. "Strawberry Wine" is eight minutes of muffled acoustic guitar and falsetto, a slow-burning, lyrically-meandering rumination on west coast slumps, high and sad, nodding to both Devendra Banhart and Neil Young. On first listen, "Strawberry Wine" plods, but the track is impeccably recorded (Johns manages to tangle a 12-string and a eukele into Adams' guitar lines, building a tingly, strummy haze), and Adams' penchant for storytelling is awfully well-showcased. Even the song's sluggish pacing is ultimately justified, as Adams' whimpers "I'm getting older/ Gotta break out," wailing desperately, incessantly-- as if he doesn't quite know how to stop himself from making noise.
The thick, elegiac "Night Birds" is 29's most memorable track, and one of Adams' better vocal performances, as he moans over hollow piano riffs, lamenting all the stagnation and hopelessness of being 26: "I feel like a body stuffed into a trunk/ From a million years of light/ And getting drunk." "Night Birds" is a haunting dirge (and introduces themes-- sinking, especially-- that pop up over the course of 29), but Johns leans too heavily on volume and echo here; Adams already has a habit of coordinating sounds and lyrics in a way that's distractingly deliberate, and by song's end, the chorus ("We were supposed to rise above/ But we sink/ Into the ocean") is so bloated with reverb it's hard not to cringe a little, fighting off the implied portrait of Adams splashing helplessly into the sea.
The pedal steel-riddled "Carolina Rain" follows in the country-travelogue footsteps of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, all railway lines, fried eggs, southern cities, and freight cars teeming with granite. "The Sadness" is full of wiggly, Ennio Morricone-inspired spaghetti guitar, while "Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part" is a piano-and-vocals meditation on loss and depression. Stunning closer "Voices" sees Adams employing Biblical players to convey proper despondency, howling "Elijah/ Don't you call," repeatedly invoking the messenger's miraculous firestorm (battling the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, Elijah shot fire from heaven to prove God's power.) "We're never coming back, once the signal's been fired," Adams roars, over barely-there acoustic strums. "Run away from the light."
Self-serious and wildly inconsistent (in both ingenuity and style), 29 is hard to swallow without acknowledging and appreciating the record's overarching storyline: getting through your twenties is way hard. Adams may churn out heaps of uneven tracks-- unfiltered and unedited, scrappy and undercooked, too long, too earnest, too much-- but 29 still fulfils its narrative promise, in terrifically failed, oddly beautiful ways.
