{"id":41216,"date":"2008-11-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/cardinology\/"},"modified":"2008-11-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-13T00:00:00","slug":"cardinology","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/cardinology\/","title":{"rendered":"Cardinology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ryan Adams needs to take a breather.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Between his critically adored band Whiskeytown, his solo albums, and his work with The Cardinals, Adams<\/st1:place> has released thirteen albums in thirteen years. Of course, this sort of thing was normal during the early days of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, but on the whole those artists had better quality control and were, well\u2026they were just better overall. Not to take anything away from Ryan Adams — there\u2019s no denying that he\u2019s one of the most talented American songwriters making music today, and even his shittiest of albums still contain songs that are far and away better than most of the nonsense being played on the radio. But he\u2019s no Dylan. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Adams\u2019 third album fronting The Cardinals, Cardinology<\/i>, is his most focused and cohesive effort since 2000\u2019s Heartbreaker<\/i>, even more so than last year\u2019s highly acclaimed — and overrated — Easy Tiger<\/i>. On Cardinology<\/i> we find a Ryan Adams who has settled in nicely to the Cardinals\u2019 musical palette and the end result is a record that sounds like it was made by a band<\/i>, a single musical collective. This is a good thing for Adams<\/st1:place>; it keeps him in check. A meaty production with a tight rhythm section and layered steel guitars, Cardinology\u2019s<\/i> sonic aesthetics compliment Adams<\/st1:place>\u2019 trademarked — and often irritating and overdone — perfectly imperfect vocals quite nicely.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Still, despite the musically unified end result, Cardinology <\/i>is probably the most uninteresting Ryan Adams album to date. It starts off damn strong, too. Album opener \u201cBorn Into A Light\u201d and the second track \u201cGo Easy\u201d compete with the album\u2019s first single \u201cFix It\u201d for the best on the record. All three are solid Ryan Adams tunes, even if they\u2019re utterly predictable. Sadly, after only three songs, the album <\/i>heads downhill, and in the end listeners are left with nine more songs that are simply too dull to stomach. They\u2019re not offensively bad songs, just not songs one would expect from a writer as talented and experienced as Ryan Adams.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Adams<\/st1:place> gets tons of hostility from critics for his genre hopping, but it\u2019s the genre hopping that always seemed to spit in the face<\/st1:personname> of these critics because unfocused or not, the quality almost always outweighed the patchy and erratic play lists. Given the innocuous Easy Tiger<\/i> and the just plain boring Cardinology<\/i>, fans and casual listeners are forced to choose between the musically bipolar — but fascinating and versatile — Ryan Adams and the more focused, uninteresting Ryan Adams.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

The former is a hell of a lot more exciting.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":29619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8254],"rating":[5619],"class_list":["post-41216","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-ryan-adams-the-cardinals","rating-rating-c"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41216"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41216"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}