Love Is Hell

Fuck sake I hate Ryan Adams

I wish he wasn’t a problematic artist as a person. I really enjoy his music but with all that has come up I don’t put him on in the way I did in the before times.

Alternative country, alternative rock. Curiosidad: versión de Wonderwall. Ni fu ni fa.

Love Is Hell is the best Ryan Adams album we've had, this is the third one and the only one not on the main list, which is interesting. It's just a lot more refined, better songwriting and composition, not quite as bland although it's still pretty much that sort of stock stuff from him, there's a decent cover of Wonderwall, I liked World War 24, this is a solid 3.

Ryan Adams is hell

Not listened to much of this artist and thought this was very good, solid alt-rock leaning singer/songwriter fare.

Rating: 8/10 Best songs: Afraid not scared, This house is not for sale, Love is hell, World war 24

May this be my greatest shame, I enjoy this man’s music!

Nice enough, although I think Ryan Adams is already represented enough on this list.

I’d give this one a 3.5. I thought it was a nice album and easy to listen to.

Ryan is a good songwriter and musician. Good album, but becomes a little too much of the same after a while

Untrue, love is cool

Ryan Adams created great albums with Whiskeytown and his first two solo albums are sublime. After that his albums are unbalanced. Each album contains some great songs, but also several mediocre ones. Love is Hell was originally not one album, but two EP's. As an album he should have removed a few of the weaker compositions and it could have resulted in a good album. Now the inferior tracks drag the album down and it's ok, but nothing more.

Hmm

I like the last album from Ryan but this was a bit bland. Sounds like he's trying out different styles on this album

Solid performance.... Good story telling

Hate ragging on someone’s entry, but meh is all I can say. Every song sounded similar to the next.

Any one song on this album is pretty good. Good enough to earn this album 3 stars. Ryan has a good singing voice and the compositions are somewhere in between blues and adult alternative. The reason this gets 2 stars is that every single song is exactly the same, is almost exactly the same ~78 rpm tempo, and this album is OVER 70 MINUTES LONG JESUS CHRIST

F this dude.

It was either genius or folly to use your own name when there is someone already established with a very similar name. I’m going to go with folly because doing a version of Wonderwall, that’s someone with high self confidence.

Don’t really love Ryan Adam’s style of music where he just sings things slower and with acoustics but he’s not horrible. The fact he does so many covers too makes me think he just loves hearing his own voice. Either way this is pretty generic coffee shop pop stuff. Not something I’d come back to. 5.6/10

Gonna keep it 100, I shut this record off when the Wonderwall cover came on.

From the get-go, in "Political Scientists", Ryan Adams uses a lot of words, cramming their ways into verses not fit to contain them, and this only to describe scenes that don't make a lot of sense out of context. Why is that woman crouching under the sink in "someone's restaurant" to write "with her pen"? It's so vague. And why would it be important she writes the singer's name in such an uncomfortable position? Is it because he thinks she owes him her career, whatever it is that she does in life? Easy sarcasm about more recent Ryan Adams news here, I readily admit it... I mean... What's the point of this verse? Surreal or quote-unquote "mysterious" songwriting needs to elicit striking pictures in your head. But here the songwriting only provides a "so what?" moment. It's a very fine line, I'll grant that to Ryan Adams. But witnessing the man straddling said line *in the first track of this album* is quite disheartening. Sure, the build-up at the end of this opener is pretty nice,. But that's the least you can do in an album made of two initial "EPs" long enough to be considered as albums themselves. You need to be encouraged to go on. But "there's no guarantees" indeed that we're gonna get a good record at his early point. Will we get inconsequential dross instead? And am I feeling this because of the other two Ryan Adams albums that found their way into the original list -- including one that was so criminally OVERrated (the badly named *Gold*), which left such a putrid taste in my mouth, all those years after ? Looks like my predictions about inconsequential dross instantly come true right after the first track. Slow, lethargic and pointless "Afraid Not Scared" indeed proves quite fast that my fears were justified, very ironically. Likewise, "This House Is Not For Sale" sounds like a reject or a B-side from U2's later career. Conversely, "Anybody Wanna Take Me Home" is a far better song, even if it's in the same key as the one before, which sorts of ruins the surprise effect. That said, this cut is sort of catchy, I'm not gonna deny it. The title track is a good song as well, even if it marks the point where Adams' forced vocal performance start to get on my nerves. As for the ambient-sounds-and-fingerpicking-laden cover of "Wonderwall", it works very well, I recognize it. OK, so that's three good tracks (or at least decent ones) in a row now. Are my fears gonna be alleviated somehow? Nah, "The Shadowlands" kind of confirms my predictions again. Sure it's moody, but also kind of sounds "empty". "She's angry like a salesman / Who just couldn't make a sale" is the flattest, most terrible line in a song that I've heard for a long while. After that, nothing happens much in "World War 24", and "Avalanche" belies its title, even if it is the fourth good (or at least decent) track up to now, "My Blue Manhattan" and "Please Do Not Let Me Go" are tedious affairs using various vintage styles and trying to make them pass off for substance. And after that, the "messy" end of "City Rain, City Streets" is sort of interesting, even if the first half of the song is rather meat-and-potatoes. I still want to warmly thank the user who suggested this record because of the song that follows. Not only does "I See Monsters" ape Eliot Smith quite well, but it is also a tearjerker in its own right. Awesome vocal hook, terrific fingerpicking work, devastating lyrics... Fifth good song out of twelve for now. And the best one in the bunch here, by a long shot. Reminds me that Ryan Adams once wrote something like "Amy" on his debut. Unfortunately, I'm in two minds about "English Girls Approximately". On the one hand, it's nice to find that sort of Dylanesque track in a long album like this. On the other hand, it sometimes feels like Ryan Adams is overplaying his hand a little here, using forced inflexions on his vocals again to sell the idea he can pretend to reach that Bob Dylan level of epic songwriting... I'm suddenly reminded of those flat lines in "The Shadowlands'... What if those lines were a confession of sorts from Adams? There's the persuasive idea that he indeed acts "like a salesman / Who just couldn't make a sale", that the emotions he harnesses verge a little too closely on the purely performative side at times, as the album closer proves again. Let's face it, the seventies singer-songwriter rock simulacrum shtick exemplified by "Hotel Chelsea Night" -- peppered with female background (unfortunately very badly recorded here) -- can become annoying somehow. Sure it's better-executed than its equivalents in the terrible, ironically-named *Gold*. That shtick still feels more "authentic' in *Love Is Hell*, in a way -- just as it was more convincing in debut *Heartbreaker*, generally speaking. But it's still a shtick. Go and listen to an artist such as Nick Wheeldon in album *Gift* to hear the difference between a musician channelling those classic rock seventies shenanigans into brand new gems and one merely going though the motions as he tries to do the same thing. It's too bad, because there is another Ryan Adams standing right around the corner, the one of the touching penultimate track "Thank You Louise", rather in the vein of "I See Monsters". That's the most interesting artist here, and he's quite obscured by the one who took over in *Gold* -- clearly favoring style over contents, even when he tries to follow a more "intimate" direction. . Final count: six or seven good songs out of sixteen (including a cover of a very famous track), and the rest is instantly forgettable. Really, Adams should have edited his two EPs into a single-disc affair. Worse, the length of the album also means that it neither fully rhymes nor reasons. There is too much discrepancy between the good tracks and the lame ones. And that discrepancy is not even endearing in the long run, as some "double albums" sometimes prove to be. But we could have gotten even worse than this, so it's not so bad, all things considered. Leaving a rather benevolent grade, then -- exactly in between my 3/5 mark for *Heartbreaker* and my 1/5 grade for *Gold*. I'm being more benevolent that I thought I would be at first. Ain't life full of surprises? ---- 2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums. 7/10 for more general purposes. ---- Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 77 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 94 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 189 (including this one) ---- Émile, tu trouveras ma dernière réponse sous le *Inside* de Bo Burnham

Ew, not listening. Ryan Adams is a mega creep.

Ryan Adams makes derivative, sappy ballads that echo much better artists and have no clear direction. He's also been accused of sexual and mental abuse of 7 women, some when they were teenagers. Not really the guy I would think deserves recognition, especially when he already had one spot too many on the official 1001.

Did you really add an album by a groomer with two other albums already on the list just to tell everyone you think Bruce Springsteen should've sang Jeff Buckley's Grace?