RYAN ADAMS
Love Is Hell, Part 2
Lost Highway

Now that both halves of Love Is Hell are available — the eight-song first volume was released simultaneously with Adams’ Rock N Roll disc on November 4, while the seven-song second installment followed on December 9 — there’s a fuller picture of what Adams’ record label rejected when he submitted Love As Hell as a single album earlier this year.

That picture still isn’t entirely clear: Adams has explained that the contents of the two Love Is Hell EPs don’t exactly match how he had presented the record. A couple of songs originally on Love Is Hell apparently ended up on Rock N Roll, and it’s also uncertain how much the sequencing may have changed as a result of the decision to split the release into two parts.

Those qualifications acknowledged, the general nature of the matter at hand is simple enough to infer. As with its companion, Love Is Hell, Part 2 is full of dark, personal, soul-searching music; it stands in stark contrast to Rock N Roll, which plays more to the surface-scratching elements of Adams’ artistry in its thinly veiled mimicry of the singer’s punk/new-wave influences.

Thus the first-glance impression that Rock N Roll may be a more commercially viable or palatable album. This is evidently what Lost Highway believed, as the label gave its promotional push to Rock N Roll while leaving Love Is Hell to languish in the shadows.

And that is not where this record belongs.

Yes, Love Is Hell is bleak, but it is a bleakness steeped in beauty, shot through with the kind of emotion that has been the hallmark of many great dark pop masterpieces. Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night comes to mind. Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Alejandro Escovedo’s Thirteen Years. Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator).

If Love Is Hell is not quite up to that level, it does play to similar strengths. Part 2 delves even deeper than its predecessor; it contains nothing like its companion’s more straightforwardly rocking diversions, “This House Is Not For Sale” and “Love Is Hell”. Instead, Adams goes further out on a limb both musically (the mystical piano enchantment “My Blue Manhattan”) and lyrically (the ghostly acoustic-guitar echo “I See Monsters”).

Most telling is the self-critical confessional “City Rain, City Streets”, in which Adams laments the fate of a “genius in a hospital bed” before finally admitting, “I fucked you over a million times, and you died.” As his voice rises and strains to cry out the last line — “Drowning slowly, lonely, my city rain” — all the passion in his heart soars up into the sky above.

And that is what matters in music.

— PETER BLACKSTOCK

(A dual review of Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell, Part 1 is featured in ND #49, January-February 2004.)