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Ryan Adams And The Cardinals
- Jacksonville City Nights
(Lost Highway)
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| Jacksonville City Nights is, apparently, the second in a series of three albums which Ryan Adams is hell-bent on releasing in 2005: not a bad show for a year’s work, and one which certainly puts my New Year’s resolution to finally take up jogging into perspective. That said, Adams has left himself worryingly little time in which to pull a third long-player out of the bag, whereas I can already run for 20 minutes without keeling over. Ha! |
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Anyway. Jacksonville City Nights is evidently some kind of tribute to Adams' titular hometown, and is his most ostentatiously country record to date. None of this "alt" rubbish here: this is "country" in the old-skool sense of the word, complete with slide guitar and songs about whiskey and women.
It’s a tricky concept to pull off, and it works best on jauntier tracks such as ‘Trains’ and ‘The Hardest Part’, which are closer to Adams’ rockier roots. The more maudlin, downbeat numbers like ‘My Heart Is Broken’ (which is as disturbingly close to ‘Achey Brakey Heart’ as the title suggests) and ‘Dear John’ (a duet with Norah Jones, and as such doomed from the start) sound a bit flat and occasionally lapses into cliché (what my dad described as “my-dog’s-dead music” when I played him the album). We in the UK have also been treated to a truly awful version of ‘Always On My Mind’ to round things off, which is crucially nowhere near as good as the Pet Shop Boys’ version of that song. But then, few things are.
Also, the lyrics push the whole thing over the edge from pastiche into parody in places: “Filled up with cotton and dime-store gin” and “Met a dark-haired girl by the Mississippi moon” are just two examples to be plucked at random from the CD booklet (I don’t just throw these reviews together, you know, except that’s exactly what I do).
At 16 tracks long, perhaps a third of this album could have been safely disposed of for the greater good, which would still have left Adams with enough material to see through his crazy three-albums-in-one-year plan. That said, when he manages to keep his more outlandishly country tendencies in check, Jacksonville... contains some genuinely affecting songs, and may well represent some kind of return to form. |
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| Mat Beal - 6/10 |
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Name:
Rik
| Date:
07/11/05 | Reply
I'm a fan of Ryan Adams, but this is a bit too country for me
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