Love Is Hell Parts I & II

Mixing the heartfelt angst of a singer/songwriter with the cocky brashness of a garage rocker, Ryan Adams is at once one of the few artists to emerge from the alt-country scene to achieve mainstream commercial success and the one who most strongly refused to be defined by the genre, leaping from one spot to another stylistically while following his increasingly prolific muse. Adams was born in Jacksonville, North Carolina in 1974. While country music was a major part of his family's musical diet when he was young (he's cited Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Cash as particular favorites), in his early teens Adams developed a taste for punk rock and began playing electric guitar.

At 15, Adams started writing songs, and a year later he formed a band called the Patty Duke Syndrome; Adams once described PDS as "an arty noise punk band," with Hüsker Dü frequently cited as a key influence and reference point. the Patty Duke Syndrome developed a following in Jacksonville, and when Adams was 19 the band relocated to the larger town of Raleigh, North Carolina in hopes of expanding its following. However, Adams became eager to do something more melodic that would give him a platform for his country and pop influences. In 1994, Adams left the Patty Duke Syndrome and formed Whiskeytown with guitarist Phil Wandscher and violinist Caitlin Cary. With bassist Steve Grothman and drummer Eric "Skillet" Gilmore completing the lineup, Whiskeytown (the name came from regional slang for getting drunk) released their first album, Faithless Street, on the local Mood Food label.

The album won reams of critical praise in the music press, and more than one writer suggested that Whiskeytown could do for the alt-country or No Depression scene what Nirvana had done for grunge. But by the time Whiskeytown had signed to a major label -- the Geffen-distributed imprint Outpost Records -- the band had undergone the first in a series of major personal shakeups, and in the summer of 1997, when Whiskeytown's Outpost debut, Stranger's Almanac, was ready for release, Adams and Wandscher were the only official members of the group left. Cary soon returned, but Wandscher left shortly afterward, and Whiskeytown had a revolving-door lineup for much of the next two years, with the band's live shows become increasingly erratic, as solid performances were often followed by noisy, audience-baiting disasters. Consequently, as strong as Stranger's Almanac was, Whiskeytown never fulfilled the commercial expectations created for them by others. In 1999, the band -- which was down to Adams, Cary, and a handful of session musicians -- recorded its third and final album, Pneumonia, but when Geffen was absorbed in a merger between PolyGram and Universal, Outpost was phased out, and the album was shelved; shortly afterward, Whiskeytown quietly called it quits.

Following Whiskeytown's collapse, Adams wasted no time launching a career apart from the band, and after a few solo acoustic tours, Adams went into a Nashville studio with songwriters Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and cut his first album under his own name, Heartbreaker, which was released by pioneering "insurgent country" label Bloodshot Records in 2000. The album received critical raves, respectable sales, and a high-profile endorsement from Elton John, and Adams was signed by Universal's new Americana imprint, Lost Highway Records. Lost Highway gave Whiskeytown's Pneumonia a belated release in early 2001, and later that same year the label released his second solo set, Gold, which displayed less of a country influence in favor of classic pop and rock styles of the 1970s. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the album's opening track, "New York, New York," was embraced by radio as an anthem of resilience (though it actually concerned a busted romance), and Adams once again found himself touted as "the next big thing."

Always a prolific songwriter, in a bit more than a year following Gold's release, Adams had written and recorded enough material for four albums. He opted to whittle the 60 tunes down to a 13-song collection called Demolition, which was released in 2002 as he went into the studio to record his official follow-up to Gold. A year later, Adams' concept album Rock N Roll was released alongside the double-EP collection Love Is Hell. Tours around the globe kept Adams busy into the next year as he maintained momentum writing songs and keeping his ever-changing presence in the music press. In May 2005, Adams released his first of three albums for Lost Highway, the melancholic double-disc Cold Roses. Jacksonville City Nights, a more classic-sounding honky tonk effort, followed in September, and 29 appeared in late December. Always prolific, in the interim period before his next album was released Adams posted a large selection of tracks -- including several hip-hop tunes -- on his website, but fans were greeted with more straightforward material on 2007's Easy Tiger and 2008's Cardinology with the Cardinals.

Adams decided to disband the Cardinals in 2009, precipitating an unusual period of quiet from the prolific singer/songwriter. He slowly returned to active duty in 2010, releasing the heavy metal Orion on vinyl-only in the summer and then issuing III/IV -- a double album recorded with the Cardinals during the Easy Tiger sessions -- in November. For his 13th solo album, 2011's Ashes and Fire, the singer/songwriter recruited Norah Jones and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' keyboard player Benmont Tench, as well as legendary producer Glyn Johns, who helmed the Who classic Who's Next.

— Mark Deming

Like any Ryan Adams album, Love Is Hell comes with a back-story, one that is carefully calculated to construct the enfant terrible's self-myth. Love Is Hell was intended to be the official follow-up to 2001's Gold -- the album that was not a collection of demos (that was 2002's Demolition), or the recorded-but-shelved albums 48 Hours or The Suicide Handbook, or even his alleged song-by-song cover of the Strokes' Is This It. Longtime Smiths fan that he is, Adams teamed up with John Porter -- the man who produced The Smiths, Meat Is Murder, and part of The Queen Is Dead -- with the intention of creating his own mope-rock album, hence the title Love Is Hell. Americana label that it is, Lost Highway balked at releasing a stylized tribute to Mancunian rainy-day bedsit music and didn't release it, encouraging Adams to record a different album, presumably one more in line with the label's taste. In the press and on the web, our hero spread stories about how the label claimed it was "too depressing" and "dark," thereby cultivating the myth that he's a maverick genius, while the label cheerfully countered with the defense that it just knew that our boy could do better. Eventually, a compromise was arranged: Adams kicked out a new album, the self-descriptive Rock N Roll, while releasing the equally self-descriptive Love Is Hell as two EPs, the first hitting the streets the same day as the "official" album, the second arriving a month later. Five months after that, the full-length Love Is Hell, containing both EPs plus "Anybody Wanna Take Me Home" from Rock N Roll, was released, negating the worth of the individual EPs (which were, after all, merely two halves of one album) and likely irritating legions of fans who bought both EPs.

While it took longer than necessary to have the whole bloody affair of Love Is Hell released as its own entity, it's hard not to view it as a companion piece to Rock N Roll, particularly because they're two sides of the same coin. In effect, both Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell are tribute albums, each a conscious aping of a style and sound, both designed to showcase how versatile and masterful Adams is. But since he's a synthesist more than a stylist, Adams, for all his bluster, winds up as a Zelig-styled character, taking on the characteristics of the artists he's emulating -- something that can be sonically pleasurable, but far from being the substantive work of mad genius that he relentlessly sells himself as. If Love Is Hell has the edge over Rock N Roll, it's because it's more carefully considered in its production and writing, and he manages to hide his allusions better than he does on Rock, where every title and chord progression plays like an homage. Here, he shoots for the Smiths and winds up in Jeff Buckley territory tempered with a dash of Radiohead circa The Bends. To claim that it is a dark affair is to criticize its milieu more than its substance, because the songs have the form and feel of brooding, atmospheric mope-rock, not the blood and guts of the music. Adams is fairly adept at crafting that mood -- anybody who's such a fan of rock history should be -- sometimes relying more on a blend of attitude and atmosphere instead of songwriting. Such is the fate of a stylized tribute to a style with specific sonic attributes, but Adams also does come up with a clutch of effective songs: the epic sprawl of "Political Scientist," which captures him at his best Buckley; the title track, which is nearly anthemic with its ringing guitars; the understated "World War 24"; the gently propulsive "This House Is Not for Sale," which would fit nicely between a Julian Cope and Morrissey track on a college radio show from the late '80s. "English Girls Approximately" is an effective Bob Dylan and Paul Westerberg fusion, and the closer, "Hotel Chelsea Nights," is one of his best songs, a mildly anthemic soulful anthem with vague overtones of "Purple Rain." Nevertheless, it's telling that the best song here is a cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall." It's a well-done cover but not much of a reinvention -- Adams uses Noel Gallagher's solo acoustic version of the song as a template, replacing strumming with fingerpicked guitars and altering the phrasing slightly -- which is why the song itself shines through so strongly: it resonates how the other songs are intended to, but don't. While it doesn't fatally hurt Love Is Hell, since it is an effective mood piece, it does undercut it, revealing how Adams delivers the sizzle but not the steak.

— Stephen Thomas Erlewine

If anyone out there is still wondering just how Ryan Adams can be so prolific, maybe it's because the urgency of his situation compels him to strike while the iron is hot. It took his former band, Whiskeytown, seven years to release a trio of critically revered albums, and his first solo record, 2000's Heartbreaker, was in the works for half that. But when Heartbreaker saw release, and was promptly met with virtually unanimous critical praise, Adams clearly became inspired and quickly turned out sixteen new tracks for a sophomore record—the rushed, overproduced Gold—which came with a bonus disc sporting five tracks in the more stripped vein of the album's predecessor. And when that album scored Adams a commercial alternative radio hit in the well-timed "New York, New York", he descended into a recording fervor that continues, unabated, to this day.

Irrational outbursts and public meltdowns aside, Adams is, at heart, an extremely gifted songwriter who just doesn't realize that what he really needs is to take a deep breath and slow the fuck down. During the course of the past two years, he's released a collection of demos (Demolition), and a 21-track side project called The Finger with ex-D Generation frontman Jesse Malin (the "double-album" We Are Fuck You/Punk's Dead Let's Fuck). He's currently planning a box set titled Career Ender, which will be crammed with five discs of the songs he's discarded since Gold dropped two years ago. And that's not even taking into account the four-tracked blues version of The Strokes' album Is This It that he's said to have recorded. Did I mention his collaborations with Beth Orton and Emmylou Harris? How about the track he co-wrote for the Counting Crows? His session work with Lucinda Williams and Alejandro Escovedo? His production work on Jesse Malin's solo album? I think you get the point. The question is: why doesn't he?

Adams originally intended Love Is Hell as his official third full-length, but his label, Lost Highway, scoffed when he handed in the tapes. Initially, he planned to rework it, but then agreed to dashing off a glossy, radio-friendlier full-length (the disasterous Rock N Roll), provided the label would also make room on their release schedule for a secondary release for Love Is Hell. It's easy to see why Lost Highway balked: an insincere, smugly posturing Ryan Adams who lives up to his stage persona by creating an album like Rock N Roll simply had to have been preferable to the miserable, slobbering woe-is-me shtick he plays up here. At least when he was wearing the proverbial alt-country tag, his balancing act of conceitedness and overemoting was halfway convincing. Unfortunately, just as the caricature-laden excesses of Rock N Roll aped garage-rockers and postmortem Rock Hall of Famers, Love Is Hell reaches for the dripping, maudlin sentimentality of Rufus Wainwright or a mock Jeff Buckley.

It's a shock, given that the press surrounding the Love Is Hell sessions had pegged the record as Adams' return to the sparse, two-in-the-morning flair of his debut—and when Lost Highway postponed the recordings, calling them "too dark," it only heightened the expectations of optimistic fans hoping for a stark, brooding future classic. Of course, it did seem something of an enigma as well: Adams' music, after all, had always faired best with pared-down arrangements making room for his own brand of confessional singer/songwriter groveling (e.g. Heartbreaker standouts "Call Me on Your Way Back Home" and "Come Pick Me Up"); shelving Ryan Adams for being too dark seemed to make about as much sense as shelving Kraftwerk for being too German.

But while it's safe to say that these EPs are certainly dark—at least in contrast to Rock N Roll and even parts of Gold—they fail to capture the striking imagery and confident vocals of which Adams seemed a master on Heartbreaker. For example, Love Is Hell's opening, piano-led "Political Scientist", replaces Adams' confessional, first-person narratives with a third-person tale that indicts the government for supplying cocaine, and candy factories for poisoning the environment. Conspiracy theories aside, playing Greenpeace spokesman is not Adams' strong suit; he attempts the political profundity of a Thom Yorke and comes off like a diet Chris Martin.

And if Adams fails to adopt Yorke's political relevance, he'll settle for the Radiohead frontman's melismatics—Love Is Hell is riddled with Adams' unabashed aping of Yorke's signature fragmented lyrical style. On the lethargic lite-country stomp of "This House Is Not for Sale", Adams repeatedly pleads, "Calm down/ Just calm down," the emotional resonance of which verges on laughable. Meanwhile, the sleepy, acoustic blather of "Afraid Not Scared" has Adams repeatedly confessing that he is "really dying in here," and just wants to be "let down," sounding about as genuinely distraught as Ja Rule sounds genuinely "gangsta."

The eight songs that constitute Love Is Hell, Pt. 1 seem intentionally built around a studio version of Adams' infamous live staple, a cover of the Oasis hit "Wonderwall". Acclaimed Smiths producer John Porter unfortunately buries Adams beneath a sobering wall of reverb, which drains the song of its spirited pop ingenuity and transforms its nonsensical lyrics into some sort of momentous, self-important dirge. Consequently, "Wonderwall" seems emblematic of the rest of the disc, a collection of preposterously cheerless (and charmless) songs that try much too hard to achieve a poignancy—or anything, really—that might hide their complete insignificance.

As Love Is Hell, Pt. 1 resoundingly proves, Adams is at his finest when he sticks to the subject matter he knows best: broken hearts and bar fights. Given this, it's no shock that the highlight of this entire project comes with the Dylanesque Beth Orton kiss-off "English Girls Approximately". Appearing halfway into Love Is Hell, Pt. 2, the song is classic Adams, brimming with his smug wit (sample lyric: "You said you didn't love me, it was right on time/ I was just about to tell you, but ok, alright") and unabashed, acoustic guitar-driven ecstasy. As Marianne Faithful lends her austere vocal harmonies to the chorus, it serves as a breathtaking reminder of the chemistry Adams shared with Emmylou Harris on Heartbreaker's divine ballad, "Oh, My Sweet Carolina".

Another highlight of Love Is Hell, Pt. 2 is its closing R&B; vamp, "Chelsea Nights". Over a bed of radiating Wurlitzer chords and bluesy guitar fills, Adams narrates a night spent aimlessly wandering New York City's unfeeling winter streets, searching for the love he always manages to lose. The track, which peaks with Adams' plaintive confession, "I played your song/ I got the melody all wrong," is filled with the self-awareness, irony, and despondency that's made Adams' best work so moving, all the way back to his Whiskeytown days; it's a shame he forces his listeners to wade through a glut of unsalvageable crap-rock to arrive at it.

Indeed, these two tracks are anomalies—happy accidents, or moments of clarity—amongst the overbearing melodrama of the bulk of material contained on Love Is Hell, Pt. 2. "Thank You Louise" serves as the harrowing antithesis to these diamonds in the rough, an atrocious slice of sloppy sentimentality in which Adams sings, over an unnecessarily bloated string section, of a mother receiving news of her son's death. For a guy who's attained uncommon levels of infamy by simply being a sarcastic fucking prick all the time, he pours on the schmaltz here like he studied under Air Supply. The Joy Division rip-off "City Rain, City Streets" is so bereft of any humor that its megalomania challenges even Conor Oberst: Adams crams nearly four minutes of distorted new-wave guitars and gratuitous reverb into this shudder-inducing display of shamelessness, proudly spouting disasters like, "I fucked you over a million times," and, "You died, you died, you really died."

Listening to these discs, one can only imagine the myriad reasons Lost Highway decided to release the Love Is Hell sessions not as one spiraling, abysmal full-length, but as a pair of EPs (let alone why they shelved it to make way for Rock N Roll instead). The obvious, cynical answer is that it wouldn't detract from the publicity they were expecting Rock N Roll to receive. But it's also easy to envision the label's creative heads considering how spreading the material out might help conceal the songs' alarmingly empty sentiments. The sad fact is, no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy, could conceal this collection's bathetic, overwrought travesties and gruesome failures. In the midst of this mess, both Adams and Lost Highway come out losers: one critical car-wreck might have been manageable, but they may not recover from two.

— Hartley Goldstein, Pitchfork