Heartbreaker

by

Ryan Adams

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I thought "Love is Hell, Pt. 1" was Ryan Adams' best musical accomplishment. I was wrong. That production, as phenomenal as it was, doesn't come close to the level he reached in "Heartbreaker", his first album after he left Whiskeytown. Perhaps I have a weakness for nu-folk and alt-country these days, but I admit I have been possessed by Heartbreaker. "AMY" is a great example of why. It brings Elliott Smith right back to mind, and other momemnts in the album remind me of Dylan and Cash as well. Overstatement? Say what you want, but Ryan Adams' solo debut is one of the most solid albums in the past five years.

A peculiar album. I've listened to it so many times by now, I feel I know when he's about to breathe, I can tell where the fingers squeak across guitar strings, and I feel I understand the lyrics more. The tunes are incredible, each having that special something, and the level of musicianship shows marked improvement over the Whiskeytown catalog (I sure wish he'd let loose just a little bit, but it's a solo effort, and that's to be expected: no electric fuzz anywhere).

But I can't get over how subpar and unremarkable the production job is here. Several songs are mixed horribly, with the instruments so low and the vocal so high, you can barely if at all tell what the melody is. ("My Winding Wheel", awesome a song as it is, suffers fatally from the bad mix). Is this a conscious style? An attempt at art? Or just a bad production job? On "Damn, Sam" and "Oh My Sweet Carolina", I find myself singing along, but not to any music: I'm harmonizing with everyone else, and that's annoying. I hear a great tune somewhere in "Come Pick Me Up", but as it unfolds, I plug my ears for the annoyingly derivative Neil Young harmonica wheeze that not only disrupts the mood of the song, but is mixed so darn loud my dog starts crying in the room next door.

There WAS an album for the ages somewhere in here: had Ryan given a few more listens to the mix, maybe it would have been a monster. But criticism aside, I'll pick the few tunes I enjoy and probably come back to this album again, at least for "To Be Young" and a few others, but wondering for a while what might have been.