Published on Nov 13, 2008
Ryan Adams needs to take a breather.
Between his critically adored band Whiskeytown, his solo albums, and his work with The Cardinals,
Adams’ third album fronting The Cardinals, Cardinology, is his most focused and cohesive effort since 2000’s Heartbreaker, even more so than last year’s highly acclaimed — and overrated — Easy Tiger. On Cardinology we find a Ryan Adams who has settled in nicely to the Cardinals’ musical palette and the end result is a record that sounds like it was made by a band, a single musical collective. This is a good thing for
Still, despite the musically unified end result, Cardinology is probably the most uninteresting Ryan Adams album to date. It starts off damn strong, too. Album opener “Born Into A Light” and the second track “Go Easy” compete with the album’s first single “Fix It” for the best on the record. All three are solid Ryan Adams tunes, even if they’re utterly predictable. Sadly, after only three songs, the album heads downhill, and in the end listeners are left with nine more songs that are simply too dull to stomach. They’re not offensively bad songs, just not songs one would expect from a writer as talented and experienced as Ryan Adams.
The former is a hell of a lot more exciting.
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