Anyway, personally I've always had a soft spot for the Adams (well the records anyway, the man himself seems to be a prize cock - just ask those stately old crumblers Neil Finn and Janis Ian), and as is often the way with record buying, if you quite like someone and their records turn up for cheap you might as well pick them up. Which is why I've ended up with hundreds of the bloody things. So, let's dive in at the start with Heartbreaker (2000) which is an album that got people talking about an Americana renaissance. That's the people who had managed never to come across the many hundreds of much better Americana acts who had been busily renaissancing for years already. But Heartbreaker is a nice album (faint praise to many but I don't see what's wrong with being nice) alternating between cutesy downbeat tunes and an endearingly old-fashioned kind of rocknroll swagger. After Whiskeytown folded (apparently according to Caitlin Cary (who will crop in a future post. Under C. For Cary) because Adams was basically a bit of a jumped up dick) it seems like he was very keen to show off how much he could do it on his own and there are some good solid tunes and some great choruses ('To Be Young', 'Come Pick Me Up') but there are also some rather irritating failures ('Amy, 'Damn Sam, I Love a Woman That Rains' - there's a song title to prove Lucy's point if ever there was one). On the whole though I reckon it was an impressive opening salvo.
The chameleon qualities really start to show up on 2001's Gold, which sets its stall out from the cover - upside-down stars and stripes, 70's T-shirt, even scrappy leather strings tied round the wrist. I did the leather strings thing, did you? The trouble was I was doing it in 1988 so instead of looking like I was trying to emulate some kind of cool, loose 70's loner, I looked like I was trying to be Morten Harket. Anyway, the tunes on Gold vary pretty wildly in style and quality, from a silly but charming sax-blasted opening rocker ('New York, New York') to loose-limbed workouts (the 10-minute 'Nobody Girl') and "plaintive" ballads ('Sylvia Plath') but the whole thing really doesn't hang together and it ultimately suffers from his inability to let anything go. I dread to imagine what a compilation of unreleased tracks would be like because he seems completely unable to employ any quality control on the released stuff. There's just too much of Gold and it starts to drag despite having decent tunes peppered through it to the end.
Although in fact his label, Lost Highway, did have to sift through FOUR albums worth of unreleasable material to cobble together the pretend album Demolition (2002). Adams' tendency to write songs that sound as if they were commissioned for episodes of The OC really shows itself in this bunch, as well as a peculiar determination to sabotage songs that might otherwise be perfectly good, by extending them too long, or by turning a melody into a caterwaul. Nonetheless there's still a hundful of tunes that work well ('Cry On Demand' for instance), but on the whole it shows that while he might well "write at least 4-5 songs a day", at least 3 of them would be worth putting on the fire. Next up is the pastiche of Rock n Roll (2003) and the gloom by numbers of Love Is Hell (2004). This is where the complaint that he is just a kind of musical leech sort of starts to make sense. Rock n Roll is really a laughable excuse for a record, a collection of half-baked parodies of classic and modern songwriting that I think was supposed to create the impression that Adams could do anything he turned his hand to but instead exposes the limitations of an artistic temperament unwilling to accept that it only has a few good cards and should stick to playing them. Love Is Hell is certainly better but also suffers from a rather desperate sense of clinging on to bits of other people's rcord collections. An alt-country Smiths tribute band doesn't even sound like a good concept let alone make for a good record. Again, there are some lovely tunes in here, but an album as calculatingly downbeat as this doesn't make for a sympathetic listen. And again, over an hour of this stuff really isn't necessary. On top of which, Wonderwall? I mean, really, must try harder.
I think things really move back in the right direction with Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights (both 2005), mainly because there are other people allowed to be involved in the process of making the records (his part time backing band The Cardinals) rather than it all being solely in the hands of a maniac narcissist. Cold Roses particularly works despite (yet again) being far too long, partly down to the fact that he seems to have remembered where his songwriting strengths really lie. In other words, we're pretty much back where we started but with a bit more skill in the studio. Cold Roses is still pathetically in thrall to the kind of stereotypical 70's classic rock sound, but at least it's much more Fleetwood Mac than Loggins & Messina, and Jacksonville City Nights is a rewrite of every alt-country cliche in the book, but it's a confident and really enjoyable rewrite.
Unfortunately then we're on to what is effectively the fourth album's worth of material (Cold Roses being a double) for 2005, 29, which is a very, very bad record. A really very bad record. What appears to be an attempt at a kind of spooked out, creepy late night trawl through psychic debris is in fact just a really, really boring hour, that feels like being stuck in a lift forever with a self-obsessed teenager moaning about how hard life is because he can't afford a smart-TV.
After a couple of years off, which was surely a good thing, Easy Tiger (2007) quietly appeared. It's quite a low-key affair, but there really are some lovely songs here ('Two', 'Rip Off') and most of the duds are pretty decent little tunes, but again, the presence of the charming Neal Casal as a co-songwriter must be significant. It's probably the closest to Heartbreaker of everything, and it's telling that that remains the benchmark, because for all the determination to prove just what an important figure he is in rock's history, the only thing people go back to is the first record, in which he most successfully aped one particularly type of rock music. Easy Tiger really only confirmed that he's pretty good at one thing and one thing only, and it's the formula he stuck with through both 2009's Cardinals reunion, Cardinology, and last year's Ashes and Fire (I haven't got, or heard 2010's double III/IV) with the same result, some really nice tunes, some faintly boring ones, but reliability is no crime and I can't help but feel he would be best served making these records until he slowly fades away entirely.
Tomorrow for yet more A stuff chums.
By the way, because I'm lazy the only way I know to put pictures on this blog means that I keep being told off for "hot-linking" (whatever that means) and the pictures vanish, so I don't know if anybody reading this can see the pictures or not. If not, sorry, they're only the record covers anyway.
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