Friday, March 28, 2008

Ryan Adams - Jacksonville City Nights (2005)



01. A Kiss Before I Go
02. The End
03. Hard Way To Fall
04. Dear John
05. The Hardest Part
06. Games
07. Silver Bullets
08. Peaceful Valley
09. September
10. My Heart Is Broken
11. Trains
12. PA
13. Withering Heights
14. Don't Fail Me Now

Everyone knows I love Ryan Adams, it's a fact. I have 48 different albums, including his full-length releases, a few live recordings, and a ton of unreleased songs. That's sick, but I'm telling you because maybe it will give me some cred on Ryan Adams knowledge and you'll believe me that this album is great. It's more country than some of his other albums, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. He's a dude from North Carolina, after all. He writes wonderful songs!

Paste review:

He kicks off the album with a solid trio of mid-tempo, piano- and pedal-steel-fueled honky-tonk moaners, most notably “The End,” which name-checks his hometown of Jacksonville, North Carolina, much like Parsons name-checked South Carolina in “Hickory Wind.” In a tearful warble, Adams recalls “the cotton fields out by the house where I was born,” where “the leaves burn like effigies of my kin.” Overkill? Yes. Dubious? Maybe. But no more so than the Florida-born, Georgia-raised Parsons, who also may have been stretching the truth a tad in remembering the Carolina “oak trees that we used to climb.”

What’s more remarkable on Jacksonville City Nights is Adams’ very real attempt at putting interesting twists on the classic country formula. He adds his thin, off-key vocal nod to Jerry Garcia on “A Kiss Before I Go,” and the tune comes off like some long-lost outtake from Workingman’s Dead. He borrows the melody of Dylan’s Nashville Skyline-era “I Threw it All Away” for the album’s best song, “Hard Way to Fall.”



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2 comments:

Warmer Climes said...

NUCLEAR album blows my mind...Im a Ryan Adams freak too... :)

L said...

I'm not a huge Ryan Adams fan, but I read that this is no ordinary country record, and no ordinary alt-country record. Cleary they were right. Your praise for this album is well deserved - thanks for sharing/posting!!