Album Review: Ryan Adams, Ashes & Fire

Ryan Adams. Photo / Supplied

If he's gone soft for his umpteenth album since 2000's solo debut Heartbreaker, it's perhaps not surprising.

The gifted, occasionally wayward, American alt-country singer-songwriter ended his album-a-year prolific streak on 2008's Cardinology, which was also the fourth and final with backing band The Cardinals, who went on to back our cover girl on her debut.

And no, that's not counting last year's III/IV , which delivered a double set of out-takes from Adams and band's 2006 sessions for Easy Tiger.

Still, while Ashes & Fire might be Adams' 13th official album in 11 years, it's his first to earn anything like a "long-awaited" or "much-anticipated" tag. Especially after he announced in 2009 that he was quitting music due to hearing problems caused by Meniere's disease and general disillusionment with the music biz.

So, if he has returned sounding mellowed - this sounds closest to his 2000 post-Whiskeytown solo debut Heartbreaker or the largely acoustic finale in his 2005 trilogy, 29 - then that's perhaps understandable.

The 11 songs are mainly propelled just by Adams and guitar, but get plenty of texture despite their low-voltage and intimate setting. Veteran producer Glyn Johns - whose hotshot producer son, Ethan, Adams has worked with before - gives this a crisp, unadorned warmth, with help from Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench on piano and organ throughout, and the harmonies and ivories of Norah Jones, at best on the sweetly melancholy Come Home.

Elsewhere, a windswept string arrangement beneath Chains of Love help give it a Bittersweet Symphony-scale grandeur at the album's midpoint while the title track takes Adams back to the twang of his Whiskeytown days as does Save Me later.

But reflective balladry with a pinch of pedal-steel plaintiveness is what Ashes & Fire does best and does most. Almost too much, with one elegantly aching song about love gone wrong - or in some cases right - blending into another.

That's right from the opening Dirty Rain, which ushers in the album's run of ruminative verses giving way to quietly soaring choruses. So does the aforementioned Come Home, with its hushed pleas; Do I Wait starts off intimately before breaking out the endless-horizon guitars and organ and there's similar touches of tumbleweed psychedelia on the following Invisible Riverside.

And on the finale, the tender torch-soul of I Love You But I Don't Know What to Say, Adams serves up a final reminder that yes, he's still a mighty fine singer and songwriter in equal measure and that yes, that the break sure has done him good.

Stars: 4/5
Verdict: Country-rock troubadour's pleasantly quiet return

Buy the album here.

-TimeOut