Uncut:
***** out of five
Adams‘ 3rd album of 2005 reunites him with Ethan Johns and once again the pairing has produced magic. Like those two landmark (Johns produced) albums and unlike CR and JCN 29 prioritises intimate revelations not idiomatic reveries.
29 gets off to a deceptively honking start with 29. Johns drenches it in reverb. Sun-style guitarist Bowerstock breaks off Scotty Moore inspired licks and the 3 man studio band han a right onto the dirt road that Canned Heat once drove down….On the remaining 8 tracks Adams elegantly askew songs are placed inside restrained soundscapes, where deeply evocative touches – like „Starlight Diner“- are felt as much as heard. Throughout, Adams‘ voice and piano or acoustic guitar dominate couched in feathery atmospherics or, on the impossibly sad and gorgeous Blue Sky Blue, overhung by billowy strings and horns.
The songs eschew conventional verse/chorus structure and narrative convention for something more hallucinatory: at one point Adams sings helpfully „I’m caught in a dream and I can’t get out“. There’s a sustained flow to 29 as the verbul effluvium time and again coalesces into vivid cinematic images like this couplet from „Carolina Rain“, an art movie diguised as a country tune: „One night at the diner over eggs/Overeasy she showed me the length of her legs“. The 8 minute „Strawberry Wine“ strings together a series of vignettes a la Dylan with the completeness of short stories. Its refrain contains a keening, falsetto-peaked melody that recalls Young’s Harvest Moon in its off-hand loveliness. Adams has never sung more commandingly or with less self-consciousness.
29 is practically clustraphobic in its intensity. „I feel like a body stuffed in a trunk/from a million years of lying and getting drunk“ Adams offers on „Nightbirds“ before the muted ballad shatters into shards of noise Wilco-like. Nope, this is not an easy album. If Heartbreaker externalised Adams‘ psyche, 29 sucks the willing listener into the undertow of his private ocean“
All Music Guide – 29
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Heaven knows why Ryan Adams decided to release three albums in the calendar year of 2005. He’s always been prolific to a fault, boasting about completed unreleased albums when his latest work was just seeing the light of day, but he never saturated the market with new material the way he did in 2005, when it seemed he was trying to break Robert Pollard’s record for most music released within a year. Grinding out three album in a year is a marathon, not just for Adams but for any of his listeners, and by the time he got to the third album, 29, in the waning weeks of December, he seemed like a winded long-distance runner struggling to cross the finish line: completing the task was more important than doing it well. There’s little question that 29 is the weakest of the three records Adams released in 2005, lacking not just the country-rock sprawl of Cold Roses but the targeted neo-classicist country that made Jacksonville City Nights so appealing. Which isn’t to say that 29 doesn’t have its own feel, since it certainly does. After opening with the title track’s straight-up rewrite of the Grateful Dead’s „Truckin‘,“ it slides into a series of quiet, languid late-night confessionals that all barely register above a murmur. It’s like Love Is Hell transported to a folk/country setting, then stripped not only of its sonic texture but also its songwriting skeleton. Apart from „29“ and to a lesser extent „Carolina Rain“ and „The Sadness,“ these songs meander with no direction; they have a ragged, nearly improvised feel, as if Adams spilled out the words just as the tape started to roll. Now plenty of great songs have been written exactly in that fashion, but they never feel as if they were made that way � or if they do, they get by on a sense of kinetic energy. With the aforementioned exceptions, the songs on 29 never have energy and they always feel incomplete, lacking either a center or a sense of momentum, nor ever conjuring the alluringly weary melancholia that carried Love Is Hell. Instead, it’s the first time Adams has sounded completely worn out and spent, bereaved of either the craft or hucksterism at the core of his work. He would have been better off ending 2005 with just two albums to his credit and letting 29 co-exist in the vaults alongside The Suicide Handbook and his other completed, unreleased records, since having this in circulation adds a sour finish to what was otherwise a good year for him.
**
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Dirty, dirty feet from the concert in the grass / I wanted to believe that freedom there could last (Willy Mason)