Thursday, December 11, 2008

ryan adams & the cardinals - cardinology


ryan adams & the cardinals, cardinology

( editor's note. do you know the Billy Joel song, "The Stranger?" Do you understand the sense - it goes back to Kafka, at least - in which various forms of mistaken identity result in our inability to distinguish ourselves and our desire from our antagonists? It has to do with all sorts of freud/lacan/etc suspicions about the ultimate ineffeable lust/death horizon. )

Anyway, here's what i'd say in regards to Ryan Adams. It is perfectly possible to write great songs without writing good lyrics. It is also true that the work of one of our preeminent songwriters can be filled with horrible lines. It is above all true that our best gtr rock needn't brandish "meaningful" words.

Yes, this is a magnificent, groovy, stony rock album. The Cardinals are the best thing ever to have happened to Ryan Adams - Neal Casal (gtr) and Jon Graboff (steel) work to make him a better gtr player, and even manage to cultivate a collective band-persona that undermines Adams' own tendencies towards (justified and unjustifiable) solipsism. Above all, they allow for his seemingly-contrived-but-actually-very-self-evident blend of grateful dead/faces/smiths/sonic youth/replacements. what do all of these rock groups have in common? They write memorable verse-choruses that are shot through with and defined by guitars even more than their sing-song-y lyrical qualities.

Now, this is not to say that the album doesn't benefit from its vocal component. regardless of the often vacuous words, the singing on the album is phenomenal. The harmonies are way more realized than on previous Cards albs, and Neal Casal is really foregrounded rather than sounding like just a backup guy.

Anywho, the songs can be lumped into roughly three seperate categories: Dead-ish, generic FM 70s and "modern."

Dead-ish: "Born Into a Light," "Evergreen," "Fix It," "Natural Ghost."
Generic 70s: "Let Us Down Easy," "Like Yesterday," "Stop."
"Modern Rock:" "Go Easy," "Magick," "Crossed Out Name," "Sink Ships."

Okay, so I've mentioned how awesome and sonic youth worship-y the Cardinals gtr tone is, right? It's just jammy, reverb-y Fender city (see the pic above.) The album recording retains this 'verb-y, live-sounding stereo gtr jangle vibe, often over- or under-laying a tasteful Garcia-ish acoustic strum-pick. Graboff's steel is often ambient, supplanted by keys or otherwise reserved - rarely is it deployed in the strict "country" sense we'd expect usually. And the rhythym section stops and starts adeptly and interestingly, in a way that reminds me of Mike Heidorn on the first 3 Son Volt records, that are herky-jerky, but always stopping and starting in 1-2-3-4 clowckwork installments. Does that make sense? Brad Pemberton of the Cards is a great drummer and seems like the dude in the band I'd most like to have a grilled cheese avec.

I've also already mentioned how much I was enamored with the packaging of this album, and its accompanying 7" and t-shirt. Lemme also mention this about the mp3 download that came with the 180-gram LP: the mp3 is a direct rip from the fucking vinyl! you hear the crackles! that impresses the crap outta me, and it should impress you too. 2008 is the year that mp3s and fancy vinyl tag-teamed compact discs to effing death!

Anyway, song by song in the key of post(ph)vainne:
  1. born into a light: this follows in the tradition of the awesome "Goodnight Rose" from Easy Tiger. if Cold Roses was clearly sort of going for a Terrapin Station vibe, 2008 Ryan is really feeling things more of a bearded, Reckoning-ish way. Great song, bad lyrics. "Keep the faith," Ryan? Really?
  2. go easy: bad lyrics, great singing. short, pretty, Cards come in and get out.
  3. fix it: great single. great swanky disco strut. great neal casal guitar break. one of the songs i will remember when i remember 2008. inoffensively carole king-y lyrics here.
  4. magick: this song is absolutely abysmal and reminiscent of the lamentable rock and roll album. ryan actually sings "later on we hit the mall" in this song. gripping, i know. i mean, it's cool that the guy lives in a bubble and decides not to write songs about Bolivian tin miners... but this is va-pid. the only way i can get through this song is imagining that it's Trefz Minx (/evil r+b) singing the "let your body move" part of the chorus. this is a phenomenally bad entry into the "New Wave Ryan" canon, and totally inappropriate alongside the other songs.
  5. cobwebs: now this i love. 'intro is the most (new school-) sonic youth-y part ever in a Ryan Adams song. as lyrics go, the haunting chords on the "if i fall/will you catch me?" make it more acceptable than it reads.
  6. let us down easy: wow, this is the Cardinals' version of Magnolia's epic "Hammer Down," which is itself a re-statement of the great Band/Crazy Horse Woodstock balladry school. how do you like the Casal/Ryan vocals here? hard to deny.
  7. crossed-out name: see, these lyrics are unbelievably emo and black-rimmed-glasses-wearing-y. but they actually pull it off, for my money! the problem is that my patience has been so stepped on with all of the less-fitting earlier new age/rich kid tripe that i cannot appreciate this small, good thing. sure i can, actually. but you get me, no?
  8. natural ghost: another high-point, for me, albeit the most blatantly kinda 80s-Dead-ish ballad. i love the guitar break, tho there's no solo and nothing really "happens." (pretty much tracks 5-8 amount to the "high-water mark" on the alb.)
  9. sink ships: this song is really boring until an uber-goth, uber-emo, uber-love is hell bridge turns us into a weird elevator shaft. it's a grand left turn.
  10. evergreen: not as silly as "Monkey and the Engineer," but at the same time it's a way more tasteless tiptoe through the tulips than anything this side of Eugene's lavender fleece factory. are you really singing to a tree on this, ryan? i thought you were mister death metal -sylvia plath guy. there is a billy corigan-like privileged whimsy when it comes adams' selection of motifs on this album. if Ryan ever finds Jesus, we're all effed.
  11. like yesterday: boom! this is the song with the 70s-sounding, interlocking/harmony gtr leads! be-au-ti-ful singing! what a treat!
  12. stop: now here's the unkindest cut of all. this is an arresting, well-written song with lean and clean lyrics and an effortlessly everyday, humane theme. it's also wrist-slittingly sad. 'so weird... after so many songs about nothing or songs that are just doused in sentimental abstractions, songs housed in hackneyed architecture... we end on this grown-up a note?
And that's how we leave it. I can bitch all i want about everything about ryan adams that doesn't directly relate to my listening to his songs... But when i'm listening i'm pretty enthralled and pretty forgiving of his trespasses. his sonics and his phonics and his sins are endlessly understandable to me. And his band's tone is my favorite one. Again, not all great songwriters - let alone great singers - have necessarily always written good lyrics. That's as silly as expecting athletes (or artists) to be adept at politics!

So long as the Cardinals remain the irresistible rock guitar force that they are, and so long as ryan adams and neal casal keep wrapping their throats around each other like lovers wrap around their nude legs... Well, there's no need for Ryan Adams to say anything "literary" or even "sonorous," let alone "true" (sic). I mean, all Van Morrison does these days is scat, right? That's what you can do when you've got the voice, right?

I guess i just don't quite understand why ryan adams gets a book deal, tho i can guess i understand why he'd wanna try to be a novelist (wouldn't you?) isn't this going to distract him from making me alternately Rumors, Planet Waves and Goo-influenced FM sounds?

5 comments:

  1. I like how we disagree on the best songs!

    Natural Ghost and Sink Ships are, in my opinion, two of the worst songs that have ended up on actual, physically released Ryan Adams records.

    I know that you talked about how lyrics don't make the song, but I honestly have a hard time NOT laughing when he sings "You make me feel like I'm here when I'm not / and it, it makes me feel like I'm not here" on Natural Ghost. I mean, its almost as good as old Van Halen singing "Only time will tell if we stand the test of time"

    and even more so, I got to wonder what he was thinking when he wrote "This position is not open now, for applicants / The application form got shredded / There was faulty wording in the documents" on Sink Ships. What is he trying to say? I don't get it, why would anyone use that as a chorus to a song?

    I just have a hard time believing that there wasn't any better songs then those two in the reported 51 (!!!!!!) songs recorded for this album.

    Another flaw for me is the clean production of the record. Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights were the first two Cardinals records. They were dirty, and sounded like, for the most part, the band was recording live (especially JCN, which wins my award for the best Cardinals record). The Cardinals are a dirty rock band live, why doesn't this LP show it? It sounds WAY to clean.

    Another thing I have a problem with is....WHERE ARE THE GUITAR SOLOS? The cards ROCK it with the guitar action live. Neal and Ryan have GREAT chemistry, soloing back and forth, and it sounds excellent! Why is there only one guitar solo on this entire album?

    You're going to get angry at me for this, but I'm getting REAL tired of Neal's b/g vox. His background vox on this record are actually ANNOYING to me at parts (see: 'Evergreen' (where is sounds like he's whining instead of singing) and 'Magick' (which I think is the best 'rock' song Ryan has ever written. Are you actually going to try to tell me that you don't just want to get up and dance on that bridge? It's killer, man!))

    Of coarse, I'd be totally lying to you if I didn't say that I like this record a lot, I'm just a bit let down by it. If they're taking this cardinals thing all the way, why aren't they showing it?

    I could go on and on, but I'm not going to.

    I'm excited to see that another record is ALREADY in the works! Here's hoping it's another JCN or Cold Roses!

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  2. chad, do you think if i posted this on the Ryan Adams message board that i'd get spammed, flamed, etc.? i do.

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  3. it depends on which one.

    the alt-country.org one, for sure.

    the ryanadamsarchive.com one, nah.

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  4. Reckoning was my fave.

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  5. And I love Evergreen, and don't like Natural Ghost. Yeah, everyone to their own favs on this album. And by the way, he gets a book deal because he can write. I'm reading a preorder of the book that's due out in March and I think it's very good. You may not like all his lyrics but he can definitely write.

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