In his fifth and most boundary-pushing album, Jacksonville City Nights, Ryan Adams and the Cardinals ease indie rock listeners into the forbidden musical territory of genuine country. As the former frontman of the band Whiskeytown, Adams looks back to his roots in rock and alt-country and stirs in a nice dollop of Hank Williams, a sprinkly of manly tears and a dash of drunken bar fights. The album progresses thematically like an ageless country tale of women, guns, religion, drinking and death, all of which make you want to either sway with your whiskey glass in hand or just cry into it.
This full commitment to the genre comes as little surprise, as his double album Cold Roses, released earlier this year, tapped into some of the honky-tonk sound that saturates Jacksonville. The album is Adams’ second collaboration with the Cardinals, who once again have added a rugged feel to his soulful, stinging ballads. The band’s masterful instrumentation and haunting back-up vocals ground the songs beneath Adams’ crooning.
The painful ode to his hometown (Jacksonville, NC) in “The End” and the expressive spiritual “Peaceful Valley” both capture the overwhelming intensity of his voice. The bluesy “Dear John” is one of the most moving tracks, featuring a surprising collaboration with the smoky-voiced Norah Jones. The pedal steel guitars and swinging rhythms in “A Kiss Before I Go” and “My Heart is Broken” are reminiscent of the definitive country sounds of the 1950s.
The imperfections in Adams’ voice and the daring arrangements in this album are far from formulaic, and they set the album apart from the often watered-down, vanilla blandness of mainstream country music. With Jacksonville City Nights, Adams does his best to save country’s integrity from the curse of over-production and hackneyed lyrics. He unquestionably succeeds.
