The early buzz on Ashes & Fire is that it's Ryan Adams' best record since Heartbreaker. If that made you check in for the first time in years, I'll translate: it's his first record that kinda sounds like Heartbreaker. Though his artistic daring over the past decade has been greatly exaggerated, this is truly a bold move for Adams. He can no longer claim to be a victim, whether it's a victim of an untamed creative streak, substances, tone-deaf record execs, or critics who have the nerve to judge him in light of his earlier work. You didn't have to hear "Come Pick Me Up" or "Houses on the Hill" first to see 29, Love Is Hell, Rock N Roll, or Easy Tiger as proof that prolific, self-destructive artists don't always make very interesting music. Above all else, there's the romantic ideal that he's a victim of himself, an implosive genius that could make Heartbreaker II if only his pride would let him belly up to the bar with his "abundance of inherited sadness" again and let the inevitably gorgeous and truthful songs simply take care of themselves.
So, yes, Ashes & Fire is Adams getting on his "I have no act" act. And while these boundaries help make it more effortless and enjoyable than his prior works of dilettantism, the strict adherence to a platonic ideal of a Rootsy Ryan Adams Album can't help but make it feel every bit as limited, a snapshot of him as an artist rather than a full portrait. While Ashes & Fire is somewhat one-dimensional, it at least picks one of his better dimensions. Above all else, it's a showcase for Adams' vocals, and they're uniformly excellent throughout. On the chorus of opener "Dirty Rain", he evokes Willie Nelson's jazzy, note-bending approach to C&W, and whether it's the rousing performance on the title track or the no-attack Neil Young tributes on Gold Rush-style folk ("Rocks"), he shows a great deal of range without reverting to his past predilections for smarmy playacting.
The equal billing suggested by the title of Ashes & Fire is a misnomer, though: There's more of the former than the latter, so don't expect the first-take intimacy of even his 2005 trilogy. Glyn Johns' production is spare and immaculate, and you can hear every bit of empty space between Adams and the other musicians, as well as the always tasteful organ and keyboard work of Tom Petty sideman Benmont Tench. But you can also hear that Johns has some very expensive microphones: it's a warm recording, but one that still has a glossy coating that never allows it to, well, catch fire. It does smolder a bit midway through with the modestly anthemic "Do I Wait" and "Invisible Riverside", which dabbles in psychedelic blues and establishes a lyrical link to "Dirty Rain" that gives the record a bit of conceptual heft. But immediately thereafter, "Chains of Love" gets a little too deep into the cushiony adult-contemporary of Easy Tiger and while it mostly evokes his own "Firecracker", it nicks the Erasure melody just enough to be kind of a distraction.
The aspect of "ashes" also designates this as a record obsessed with aftermath, searching for truth and permanence within the wreckage of the past. Though it lacks for autobiographical detail, it's easy enough to fill in the blanks when Adams gravely intones "I'm just looking through the rubble/ Trying to find out who we were" on "Dirty Rain", or more pointedly on first single "Lucky Now", "am I really who I was?" And Adams' lyrics are every bit as based in the elemental: shadows, stones, rivers, and way more rain than should be allowed for a record made in Los Angeles. And yet, Ashes & Fire's mixed and muddled use of big symbols too often result in ballads of big nothing. A literally rendered song called "I Love You But I Don't Know What to Say" should be a self-deprecating epigram to an album that sounds like it's got so much truth to share, but here it's an M.O. It's actually more of a political work than his Love Is Hell laugher "Political Scientist" in how it asserts that saying all the right things in light of a public admonishment is to say nothing that can be held against you. While the subtly devastating line, "and the night will break your heart but only if you're lucky now," appears to welcome the ability to acknowledge and appreciate pain in light of his well-documented battles with Ménièr's Disease and alcohol, elsewhere he invokes what he sang on Whiskeytown's "Sit and Listen to the Rain": "used to feel so much, now I just feel numb."
And it's not even the sort of impressionism he tried on 29 or Love Is Hell to feign depth. Given the right emotional context, the tremble of Adams' voice and words can level easy marks-- upon hearing the distorted guitars slowly bloom during the bridge of "Do I Wait", I was anticipating a returned text message that arrived a half hour later, and during the span of those three minutes, Adams could make it feel like the onset of an incapacitating loneliness. Problem is, after a couple of spins wash out Adams' vocal color, you're left with the almost Zen-like emptiness and portent of would-be truisms like, "Everything you are to me is bigger than the spaces/ Between us and the chains of love." As a singer, he does what he can to redeem "Save Me" and "Come Home", which are every bit as trite as their titles would suggest. But while the emotions are too legibly rendered to be completely unaffecting, Adams' words fail him. I won't begrudge a man his feelings, but is the central architecture metaphor ("you built those walls to keep your fears inside") the best he can do?
While discussing Ashes & Fire with a friend, the question was raised as to what sort of reception the record would merit had it come from any number of acoustic-toting songwriters who didn't happen to be the former lead singer of Whiskeytown. That's up for debate, but the bigger problem is that Ashes & Fire could have come from the likes of Matt Nathanson or Matthew Mayfield were it not for Adams' voice. While Heartbreaker is legendary as a drinking partner, calling it merely a break-up album doesn't do it justice. Adams could be funny, he could rock, he could be bitter, he could do that all in the span of one song, while Ashes & Fire is steeped in a sober contentment that feels limiting even though it shouldn't. Adams evokes the goodwill of his masterpiece as a singer, anyway, even if the songwriting doesn't come close. Rather than equal Heartbreaker, here he might have accomplished something more difficult: making it somehow seem underrated.
