Ryan Adams
Love is Hell, Pt. 2
Adams is quite the prolific songwriter, as this release follows his full-length “Rock N Roll” album and “Love is Hell, Pt. 1” EP by a little more than a month. Most impressive is how varied and how good all three are, with the loud, brash “Rock N Roll” countered by the dreamy and sad “Love is Hell” CDs.
On “Pt. 2,” Adams’ tales of romantic entanglements and break-ups and worse are set to gentle, lilting melodies, with cello and pedal steel guitar adding extra dabs of melancholy. It’s difficult to believe that much of the material on both parts of “Love is Hell” was rejected by an exec at Adams’ record label as being too uncommercial.
Take away: Love hurt
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com).
