AR: Jacksonville City Nights

Ryan Adams - Jacksonville City Nights (2005)

This album is, quite plainly, a genre exercise. The alt-country wunderkind has dropped the "alt-" from the category and delivered a straight-up, no chaser '50s-'60s style of standard country originals. I.e., a return to roots - no ironic frills here, just an honest rendition of the old-style stuff, the types of tunes that were probably playing on the radio while the heat pipes just coughed. And Adams and the Cardinals do quite a job with it, giving the procedure a crystalline feel that drops slide guitars and fiddles against waltz-beats like no one's business. Immaculately produced, clear and brilliant sounding country and/or western, with all the sorrow and pentatonic joy that brings. In short, this a thoroughly professional disc, and Adams's personality, vocals and songwriting manage to raise it above a mundane retread of past ground (Adams's vocals are the best part of his music, imho). Some of the tunes veer from trad country and enter singer/songwriter meditation territory (e.g. "Silver Bullets,"), and Norah Jones stops by for an overwrought, cluttered guest vocal ("Dear John"); these are the disc's weaker moments, but they don't drag a good thing down.

I have a long-standing hatred of country music, but it should be thoroughly qualified: I hate country music that echoed through Clark football locker rooms circa 1993-6. The moronic pop-with-a-twang take that will happily mine anyone from Eddie Cochran to All 4 One for soul-less, idiotic blah-hits that alternatively retread the same aw-shucks working class metaphors over and over and over is the thing that I hate. I'm actually a quite reasonable fan of the old-style stuff, which I'm guessing is quite a vague claim - I mean Cash, Elvis, Nelson, Haggard, etc. I'm relatively sure the Dead tempered me to this point. I can't pretend to be knowledgeable in the area, but the non-shiny style does not make me run screaming in Pavlovian terror. So this disc does that trick, or doesn't do the Pavlovian one, to be sure. It's a thoroughly pleasant laid-back run-through, firmly in the genre. Or, as Spin described it, a "completely non-shitty Nashville country record [that] reminds you why Adams was once a big deal."

No real point in running through song by song, as I'll invariably just say "waltz," "stomper" and "slide guitar" over and over. I am, though, a bigger fan of the mid-tempo, crying into my beer style country songs - the ballads herein are all solid and pace the disc nicely, but I wouldn't necessarily seek them out as stand-alones. The best of the former are the opening "A Kiss Before I Go," "The End" and "My Heart is Broken;" of the latter, "Pa" catches me best. Maybe the most interesting song on the album is the almost Celt-affected "Peaceful Valley," a 3/4 tune in which Adams rides the line between his proper and falsetto range excellently.

All of that praise foisted, the very fact that this is such a solid instantiation of form tends to render it less memorable for me. It's a great listen, but one that does not imprint entirely. It's reportedly one of Adams's most solid efforts, though his other album with which I am most familiar (and that prompted me to grab this), Heartbreaker, is vastly more striking. That is an album that feels like spectacle; this is one that makes you say, "hey, good disc." Still, if you're in the mood for a whiskey-drenched night, or just aching for some old-style country sung by a modern talent with faithful, stripped down execution, this is nothing really, nothing to turn off...

Status: Recommended (solid)
Nyet's Fave: "A Kiss Before I Go"