On more than one occasion,
Ryan Adams
has played solo acoustic gigs that consisted almost entirely of songs he wrote the afternoon of the show, and after his 2001 album,
Gold
, finally gave him an audience outside the small but rabidly enthusiastic
alt-country
scene, the very prolific
Adams
seemed to waste no time laying down as many songs as he possibly could. If one believes what one reads in
New Musical Express
,
cut about four albums' worth of material during sessions with various musicians and producers within the space of a year (not even counting the much talked about but to date unheard four-track recordings of
blues
versions of all the songs from
the Strokes
' debut disc,
Is This It
). Sensibly enough,
and his record company decided that releasing such a huge flood of material wasn't in the best interest of either artist or label, and instead
cherry-picked these sessions into a 13-track collection,
Demolition
. Appropriately enough,
sounds less like "the third
album" than a collection of stray tunes -- some of which are very good, especially the lazy summer vibe of
"Tennessee Sucks,"
the up-tempo acoustic twang of
"Chin Up, Cheer Up,"
the winsome
"Cry on Demand,"
and the heading-off-the-rails rocker
"Starting to Hurt."
But more than a few of the other songs on the album sound like rough drafts rather than completed works, and
seems to lack a strong thematic or structural center. In short,
sounds like a bunch of demos, which of course is just what it is, and while it preserves a few strong tunes and offers an insight into
' creative process, it also makes clear that even the rising wunderkind of
Americana
can benefit from a bit of judicious editing and polishing. ~ Mark Deming