Ryan Adams: Heartbreaker

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Before you start e-mailing me, that's definitely Ryan Adams, not the awful lumberjack rocker.

This Adams was part of the American alt-country rock outfit Whiskeytown which foundered at the third album stage. A sad tale of record label takeovers and the like but with a silver lining - it allowed him to go off and do his singer-songwriter thing on what is a quietly fabulous solo debut.

A mix of hearty roots-rock and heartsick fingerpicked folk, Adams and his backers - who include recent visitor Emmylou Harris on trademark harmonies on Oh My Sweet Carolina and likewise Gillian Welch on two tracks - deliver a stirring set that, as an album, rises above its genre limitations.

It does that with a mix of intimacy and plaintive songpower, at its best on the Welch-assisted brooding banjo ballad Bartering Lines; the Ron Sexsmith-like Call Me on Your Way Back Home; the waltz-time Dylanesque Damn, Sam (I Love a Woman that Rains); and the lilting and bittersweet Come Pick Me Up.

Occasionally, Adams rocks low and hard, kicking off in tumbleweed-Beatles style on To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high) and later ripping it up with the rockabilly swagger of Shakedown on 9th Street.

Possessed of a distinctive woozy, wounded singing voice, Adams and his sad songs make Heartbreaker well titled and well worth investigating - ask for it by name, carefully.

(Cooking Vinyl)