any ryan adams fans?

Started by abbey road, May 21, 2003, 03:41:41 PM

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blackmamba


modage

Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

blackmamba

ahhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!! who the fuck is that ugly creature?

modage

nah, its better.  the black teeth were totally creeping me out! :shock:
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

SoNowThen

So I picked up both new Ryan Adams' discs.

I find it interesting that someone could have both the best AND worst discs in the same year, but he's managed to do it.

Love Is Hell (pt.1) is half of the long-overdue follow up to Gold. Deemed too depressing and dark for general release, the execs shit-canned it (at least that's the rumor). So now, a year later, we finally get to hear it split into two EPs (I presume to make some extra dough, a la Kill Bill). Well, thank god somebody fought for its release. LIH is pure brilliance, along the lines I've come to expect from Adams.

Now, on to the "album proper", Rock n Roll, the official follow up to Gold (because of course we can't count the wonderful demo album we got last year). I dunno how many of you play guitar, but those that do, y'know when you're jamming with friends, and you've had one beer too many, and you start playing big fat riffs that go nowhere, and you start making up lyrics on the spot, and you laugh and play, and generally just fuck around? Well, imagine you released an album of that. Good lord, this is the guy whose work I sucked off of Kazaa like a vacuum, whose unreleased catalogue was every bit as brilliant (and large) as the official releases, who wrote 4 songs a day and they were all great??? One can only hope Ryan was playing a crule joke on the suits (or us, maybe), and now he's got it out of his system. Halfway through the album I couldn't believe that there was not ONE MINUTE of decent music on it. Then the title track, Rock N Roll, started playing. Outstanding... for a moment I was caught back up in the awe I had when I first heard him. It was fucking bliss, 2 minutes or so, and then it was over. The rest of the album was sufficiently as bad as the first half. It was as if Ryan had made an apology with the title track (if you hear it and pay attention to the lyrics, you'll know what I mean)... and gawd, it was so good it almost salvaged the entire thing. But not quite.

So I have one message for Mr Adams: please fuck around on your own time. You have 6 (or so I hear) albums' worth of backlogged material. Release that. We don't need another Strokes or Vines or BRMC, they will do just fine. We need you to be you -- the bastard son of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards. And we need you back fast, please.

Everyone go buy Love Is Hell. And leave that other shit stack on the shelf where it belongs. I've been praising this guy way too much, way too loudly, and I simply can't defend it...
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

meatwad

damn, my friend just made me a copy of rock n roll, i was planning on running home and listening to it. I'll think twice now

modage

i like rock n' roll.  but i am not a HUGE ryan adams fan.  i didnt get into him until Gold, which i thought was great.  i went back and downloaded Heartbreaker which i never really got into for whatever reasons.  then i saw him live.  the performance was both awesome, and tedious.  moments were incredibly rock n roll but there was a lot of self indulgence going on.  still i just figured thats his thing, so it was an okay show.  he was nice enough to sign my Gold cd so he seems cool enough.  i did not like demolition at all, (see previous thoughts on othe rpage).  

and now out of the blue some new stuff comes out.  well, like i  said the other day the album leaked and i got it, (having not even listened to him in about a year), and i like it.  it is completely completely different.  and full of big stupid riffs and such.  but i think the songs are still good, (in that stupid and fun pop britney and boy bands strokes-y kinda way, not in that deep and meaningful coldplay, metallica, radiohead way).  not that there's anything wrong with that.  

whereas Gold seemed like his 'classic rock' 60's and 70's album, this seems more like his late 70's and 80's album with songs like so alive, burning photographs, and she's lost total control that sound right out of that era.  i dont know that this is the direction he's going in, i think its probably just a pit stop to prove to himself that he should be able to do whatever he wants.  i believe the new spin (with the strokes on the cover) has an article on him where he talks about the new cd and with his growing up on punk and Black Flag and hardcore and one of his friends was like "well, where's that in your music?"  so here it is.  

i dunno, i had ZERO expectations, like didnt know if i was gonna buy it or not, but i will now.  have not heard love is hell yet, but when i get some money ill probably get both.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

blackmamba

Jack Johnson's new album was a major dissappointment, but definitely not Ben Harper's   :-D
I got into Ryan Adams after I was on train to visit a friend and a complete stranger told me that he was awesome and I should look into him. It was a pleasant discovery.

modage

i've been listening to the album today a lot after your review sonowthen, just to make sure it really isnt crap.  and i think i like it more the more i listen to it.  my suggestion is go in with an open mind and just start playing it in the background.  i think it'll grow on you.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

SoNowThen

at the suggestion of mod-age, I have been spinning the album in the background over the last couple days. I was over-harsh on it. It is not shit. I definitely like it least of all the Ryan Adams releases, but it's growing on me. It's decent pop/glam/rock.

But everyone needs to get the EP. It's amazing. Love Is Hell. Go listen to it. Now.

Wheeee.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

modage

been spinning the Love Is Hell ep at sonowthen's request.  although i think i like Rock N Roll more, it has its moments.  has his ode to morrissey, the title track "love is hell" been discussed already?  has godardian heard it yet? its got him written all over it.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

SoNowThen

oh goodness, Politcal Scientist is probably the best song he's ever written. It's what Coldplay has been trying at the last two years.

Shadowlands is beautiful.

And his reinvention of Wonderwall breaths new life into an old(?!) classic.

It's 400 times more complex and subtle than RockNRoll, as much as I'm enjoying that one now.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

SoNowThen

Wheee... just picked up Love Is Hell pt.2
should be good.


here's a nice article:

Paste
December 2003/January 2004

Dem Lit Man
By Wes Orshoski

But at the moment a smile spreads across his face.  We're talking about "Empty Baseball Park," a tune he wrote with his former band, Whiskeytown, and the subject brings back good memories.

"I always liked that song, and that line in it about stumbling into an empty baseball park—'Strike one, strike two, strike three, we're all out,'" he says, a far-away look in his eyes.  "That was all about the whole band, the guys in Whiskeytown.  We literally rehearsed behind a baseball park for junior league kids in Raleigh."  As he slouches over the table of a 10th Street bar in Manhattan, Adam's smile widens and he stares off into space as he remembers mischievous, drunken afternoons rooting for local youngsters, and pot- and Miller High Life-filled nights at the park, not far from the North Carolina State University chapel.  "We would just get loaded and go over there, and we'd be running around tacklin' each other and just being f----s.  It was the funniest place to hang out.  We'd just get loaded and wake up hungover on, like, home plate, like, at 6 a.m. [Drummer] Skillet [Gilmore] would be asleep in the bleachers."

"Empty Baseball Park" was left off the original pressing of Whiskeytown's 1994 debut, Faithless Street, but Outpost/Geffen included it with several other bonus tracks on its 1998 reissue.  Somewhat ethereal, the song sounded little like the standard alt. country fare that made the band No Depression darlings.

However, that one song made clear – some five years ago – that Adams was an artist who wouldn't be boxed into one genre.  Since then, we've heard him embrace a myriad of directions and styles – and successfully execute each with apparent ease.  "He does folk, he does bluesy stuff, he does country, he does rock, and I believe it all," ex-Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha told this writer in 2001.  SO, given this, it seems odd that Adams' record company, Lost Highway, rejected Love Is Hell, the album he refers to as "the work of my life," and which he describes as a "completely atmospheric, spiritual, sad, freaky, unrock record."

The album references artists that Adams says Lost Highway, a roots label, was not interested in him referencing – Leonard Cohen, Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, The Smiths.  Additionally, the lyrics on the album, even by Adams' own account, are "really f--- -ed up."  It bears little trace of the alt. country strumming on Whiskeytown albums, the wounded folk of Heartbreaker or even the ragged, Stonesy rock of Gold.

"Love is Hell kind of had – has – the potential to be a doomy record that can befriend people who are in a doomy place," Adams says.  "And that wasn't a career move that my label felt like I needed to make at that time."

Adams had just finished a lengthy tour supporting Gold, and was feeling rather burnt out when he wrote and recorded Love is Hell.  "I was going through a lot of personal things, a lot of heaviness."  Declining to share any details, he notes, "All you have to do is listen to the album and all the answers are there."

While the rejection did – and still does – irritate Adams, when he explains how his eventual battle with the label ended, his voice rings with triumph.  And it should: After cutting ties with the label for several months, and recording another album on his credit card, the singer persuaded Lost Highway into issuing the equivalent of three albums within a six-week timeframe.  His next "official" full-length CD, llornkcoR ("rock'n'roll" spelled backward) arrives Nov. 4, along with the first two EPs, Love Is Hell, Part 1.  The second Love Is Hell installment comes out in December.  The Eps will later be joined together as a double vinyl.

While Love Is Hell is doomy and dark, llornkcoR (which Adams calls "Rock'n'Roll Reverse") is the singer's heaviest record yet – at time New Wave-y, at times blistering.  While some early feedback has called it his reaction to the current rock scene, Adams says that's false:  "This was just the thing I needed to do, 'cause I hadn't done it yet.  It was a fun thing to do, the obvious thing to do."

While perhaps it's just the particular ebb and flow of this conversation, it seems as though the more Adams talks about the two projects, the more he seems to downplay llornkcoR – which features guest turns from Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong and ex-Hole/Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur – as if it was easy to make.  While the album is certainly a departure for Adams with its post-New Wave and garage elements, it still feels like a natural follow-up to last year's Demolition.

On the other hand, Love is Hell was apparently a record he obsessed over:  "It's something that I totally believe in, and people close to me, who have heard it, it's affected them in very serious ways – not just in, like, 'This is nice, this is big and it rocks.'  It's completely unstylized and an absolutely reckless album, and I think that later on, it'll be, I think it might be a serious album...the place where I was the most myself and freest."

Born in Jacksonville, N.C., Adams who just turned 29, has been back in New York for nearly two years.  Aside from brief stays in Nashville and Los Angeles – where the Heartbreaker and Gold albums were recorded, respectively – he's spent pretty much all of his 20s in Manhattan.  "I just belong here," he says.  "I get along here.  It makes sense to me."

Adams split with the Pink Hearts, the Nashville-based band that supported him on his Gold tour, after a Fourth of July gig in Battery Park.  Since then, he's shared band members with Jesse Malin, whom he's producing once again.  (Adams helmed the former D Generation front man's acclaimed solo CD, The Fine Art of Self Destruction).

Many of the songs on Adams' forthcoming releases have come out of writing sessions with close friend and drummer Johnny T., and the owner of two of Adams' East Village haunts (including the bar we're currently sitting in).  They arranged songs together, with Adams producing.

A number of llornkcoR songs, the drummer says, were first takes.  We run through a verse and a chorus and then Ryan says, 'OK, stop.  Roll the tape.'  And I'm like, 'Where's the bridge?'  'I'll nod you in on the bridge, just follow along.'  And I find that to be exhilarating, to be flying by the seat of your pants, but just to be able to have a vocabulary where you can actually kind of guess where the next person in going or where the next part's going to be—or not—where he' getting ready to go big and I bring it down."

As a result, the disc boats a few "happy accidents," Johnny T. continues: "There's a lot of parts on that record that happened because I didn't know what was coming next and I'd switch to something else, and we're like 'Whoa, that was funky.'"

In addition to the dozens of songs they plan to release this year, they also have plans to post new songs on Adams' website each week.

During our two-hour conversation, Adams exhibits flashes of the precociousness, brattinesss and arrogance for which some have come to lathe him.  When he first sat down, the baby-faced singer seemed bored, doodling "Don't write on the table" on the paper tablecloth.

Repeatedly, he voices a "f---you" attitude to "haters" in the press and elsewhere who take swipes at him for his lifestyle, his music being derivative, or the temper tantrums he's thrown onstage after yet another "Summer of 69" request.  He's angry and fed up.

And although he doesn't seem to care anymore—if he ever did—whether people understand where he's coming from, the longer he talks about these new records—and his love of music in general—Adams reveals a side of himself that's more endearing, and probably more telling in regards to who he really is.  What one sees when they get past the "f---this," "f--- that" façade is the singer-songwriter's music geek/mad-scientist side.  And this quickly makes up for all the other nonsense—becoming as charming and heartwarming as his songs.

He talks of working on flamenco rhythms and accidentally—and quite wonderfully—paying homage to Johnny Marr and The Smiths.

Of loving the Strokes' Is This It so much that one day when he was sick, he figured out all the parts on each track.

Of song structure and learning the vocabularies of each instrument, and what happens when you mix them up.

Of discovering what made him react so strongly to Nirvana, what got in his head about The Replacements "outside of genuine sentiment or totally being overwhelmed by emotion and music."

Of understanding how to hit people in the gut the same way the Marr, Kurt Cobain and Paul Westerberg did.

Of falling in love with not only the way music makes him feel, but the mysteries of how it's created.

Of fully understanding music on a spiritual level, being one with it and with God in order to create greater art, or at least more fulfilling art.

Adams says he fees that the truest conversation one can have with God is a creative conversation.  He's trying to remove others—be they critics, fans, label personnel, anyone and everyone—from that conversation.  He's trying to simplify.

"I wanna simplify so far back to the point where I see the buffalo, and I grab the piece of charcoal and I go to the cave.  And I sketch the buffalo on the cave wall.  That's the highest art."

"Ya know, the caveman certainly wasn't trying to f—in' impress the girl down the street that worked in a record store with his goddamn caveman drawing," he says with a laugh.  "People couldn't understand how beautiful that buffalo was, and something compelled him to go to that wall and draw a buffalo on the wall because he dreamt of the buffalo.  His relationship was still directly with God, not even with the cave wall or the charcoal.  He's like 'I see buffalo.  I recreate buffalo.'  That's all it is.  I want to get there."

And he stresses that with each swipe he nudges a little closer.  "I say, 'Bring it on.  Go and get the whole bucket of shit and throw it at me, 'cause I see the cave clearer every day.'"
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

Ryan Adams is interviewed by Parker Posey in the new Interview (w/ Naomi Watts on the cover).

Apparently, Posey and Adams are a couple. I didn't know.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

SoNowThen

yep, Parker's got good taste in music, and Ryan has good taste in sexy brunette actresses (he was dating Winona Ryder before)...
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.