Ryan Adams: Rock'n'Roll

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Ryan Adams, it seems, has been having some difficulties other than dealing with hecklers requesting that he play something by the near-namesake veteran stadium rocker. On the way to this, his fourth solo album, the celebrated and amusingly annoying singer-songwriter scrapped an album - a reportedly tortured affair entitled Love is Hell after label Lost Highway rejected it. They possibly feared he'd strayed too far from the rootsy sensitivity of breakthrough debut Heartbreaker and beefier, if patchy, follow-up Gold, just when they needed an album that would put Adams over the top.

Rock'n'Roll is his next best offer. It sure isn't Heartbreaker or Gold II - let's not count last year's tedious stop-gap collection Demolition - but it is the sound of Adams reconciling his influences with his place in rock's scheme of things this year.

Like many a contemporary New York rock album (see Rapture and Interpol reviews below), it can sound like it wishes it was born in Manchester 20 years ago.

That Adams is a major fan of the Smiths was already obvious from the studio discussion audible before Heartbreaker's opening track.

But here, he's doing a major Morrissey and Marr homage on Anybody Wanna Take Me Home, as do the guitars underneath Burning Photographs.

There are also major hints of flag-waving early U2 on So Alive, all of which might seem incongruous for a denim-shirted figure with the alt-country roots in his pre-solo band Whiskeytown.

But as he reminds us on the Nirvana-meets-Ziggy rocker 1974 ("just like the day I was born"), he was a child of the 80s, back when rock music came with synthesisers as non-optional extras.

Though Adams' timewarp expands through to the near-present with the Nirvana spoof Note to Self: Don't Die, and Shallow which sounds like Cobain fronting Oasis. As well there's a Strokes-referencing opening track This Is It, and a Verve rewrite The Drugs Not Working.

Yes, there are a few tracks which don't suggest identity crisis or affectionate rock-kleptomania. Not many of those you remember afterwards though and some songs suggest this was something of a rushed job in the lyric department.

But Adams somehow pulls it off with wit and abundant energy and you wind up admiring the bare-faced cheek of a man delivering his own desert island disc. And, rather than crying out for Summer of '69, those hecklers can now shout: "Play the Smiths/Nirvana/U2 one!"

In the run of albums that makes up the increasingly oddball Adams family, this is definitely the lurch.

Label: Lost Highway