This was not the Ryan Adams album I was expecting. I ended up downloading the leak like a hardened criminal because these days labels send out the kind of CDs that don't play on computers (otherwise, albums might leak). Squinting at my iPod, I misread the title of one of the songs as "Ryan Adams Rip Off", and I suddenly hoped this was going to be his self-referential comedy album. You know, the follow-up to recent stunts like Adams' online-only 2006 hip-hop debut "Welcome to Ryan Adams Dot Com Motherfucka (Aw Shit)". That there's a track called "Halloween Head" only furthered my suspicions. A couple of days later I realized all the songs on my MP3 rip had Ryan Adams' name in the title; there's just a tagging error I'd somehow only noticed on one.
As it turns out, the singer-songwriter's ninth studio album since Whiskeytown is more consistent-- if more predictable and less spectacular-- than pretty much any other record in his exhaustive catalog. If 2001's Gold was a bid for the "multi-platinum ring," as Pitchfork's Chris Schiel put it, the music on Easy Tiger suggests Adams is vying for a spot on the Starbucks CD rack*. * This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in contrast to Gold, or his inspired 2000 solo pinnacle Heartbreaker, the move feels like a forced attempt to grub some crossover dollars and prime retail exposure.
Hell, it just might work, even if there's no "New York, New York" here, or "Come Pick Me Up", or whichever your favorite Adams song might be. Because even while Easy Tiger consists mostly of second-tier Adams songs, it remains blessedly free of the third-tier compositions that marred 2002's Demolition, 2003 two-fer Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell, and the last of Adams' 2005 triptych, 29. These new songs don't always offer enough to cling to after repeat plays the way his best songs do, but producer Jamie Candiloro-- who has also worked with R.E.M., Luscious Jackson, and Luna-- helps put together a sonic landscape that makes any room feel oh so tastefully arranged.
Adams has used several of his albums to stake out new (old) stylistic territory the way other bands switch wardrobes. Easy Tiger, however, is practically a compilation of his past seven years, minus Rock N Roll's new wave bent. The Cardinals, who played backup on the three 2005 LPs, return here to the loose, dueling-guitar jams of Cold Roses on opener "Goodnight Rose", and to the steel-twang country of Jacksonville City Nights on "Tears of Gold". They even leave Adams alone for Heartbreaker-style finger-picking on the lonely-boy lament "These Girls" (a cast-off from 2000's unreleased Destroyer). Despite harmonica that recalls "Come Pick Me Up", the wistful finale "I Taught Myself How to Grow" might just as easily belong on sad-bastard Anglophile outing Love Is Hell. So could another crashing piano ballad, "Off Broadway", about being lost in your own city.
For a change, let's talk about Adams' voice-- how he shapes phrases and sentences, and occasionally slides them around the edges of the beat during "Goodnight Rose" and the mellow acoustic rocker "Everybody Knows" (with its heartbreaking refrain, "You and I together, but only one of us in love"). A gifted chameleon, Adams' voice transforms from a fragile After the Gold Rush whine on "Off Broadway" and the album's finale, to a huskier, low-register rasp on dull mid-tempo rocker "Two Hearts" and the folky "Oh My God, Whatever, Etc." He goes husky to a fault on the contrived "The Sun Also Sets"-- a stark contrast to his stoic country croon on the down-home "Pearls on a String". Fittingly, the free-wheeling opener and its anachronistic vernacular ("the whole she-bang") take Adams back to the Jerry Garcia tones of Cold Roses, stretched rolling-paper-thin. If what Adams is singing often veers toward vague maxims ("Don't live your life in such a hurry/ Life goes by us all too fast"), at least he's got the delivery down.
I wasn't entirely off-base about Easy Tiger's good humor, either. "Rip Off" is just a moseying country-rock exercise that packs some brutal honesty ("It's a little too late for goodbyes," Adams opines), but chugging rocker "Halloween Head" is so much funnier than its title suggests: "Here comes that same old shit again/ I've got a Halloween head," it begins. When there's a guitar solo, Adams shouts, "Guitar solo!" And when the song ends, we hear piped-in thundershowers, straight out of the Doors' "Riders on the Storm". Just as another larger-than-life figure, R. Kelly, went from "Bump N' Grind" to "Ignition (Remix)" to the comic stylings of "Sex Planet", Adams has gone from "My Winding Wheel" to "Wonderwall" to this. Man, I really wish he'd made a whole album's worth.
The full-court press push behind Easy Tiger suggests that the AOR consistency of its music is the result of Adams' newfound sobriety. (Then again, the guy has self-mythologized so long we should assign ratings to his news clippings.) But "Two", the album's first single and a duet with Sheryl Crow, encapsulates Easy Tiger's best and worst-- a tight band, spare yet evocative vocals, but also undercooked lyrics and a twangy, light-rock approach that verges on total snooze. According to The New York Times, Adams scrawled a caricature of himself singing lyrics that spoof the song's chorus: "Blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine/ It takes two when it used to take one." See? Comedy Gold.
