Is it possible to make a great record without sounding remotely original? It’s certainly possible to try. Ryan Adams has cranked out almost a dozen albums over the last decade, his considerable songwriting skills not so much indebted as cripplingly mortgaged to the Stones, The Band, Dylan, Neil & Crazy Horse. The stuff of the alt country canon sure, but serrated with a crucial edge from years of listening to Black Flag and Minor Threat. And, as anyone will know who caught his band’s sessions on the last season of the Henry Rollins show, Adams has got the fire back in his belly of late.
But even discounting the Cardinals’ wonderfully scuffed sound, the songs themselves are reason enough to shout Cardinology from the rooftops. Every tune here sounds like a secular Saturday night prayer dressed up in western shirt and motorcycle boots. ‘Born Into A Light’ is the best sad song Emmylou’s never sung, ‘Go Easy’ a beautiful, fragile appeal to an ex-lover (when Adams sings, “I will always love you/So go easy on yourself” you believe it, no question). The flipside is ‘Fix It’, slinky but forlorn, snapshooting a spurned romantic prowling the shadowlit alleys looking for a last drink, while the pedal steely ‘Cobwebs’ and ‘Natural Ghost’ could be Townes Van Zandt backed by Radiohead. Then they go and top the whole set with the bruised and broken ‘Stop’, a cross between the Betty Blue theme and the best Tonight’s The Night out-take never written.
If Cardinology were a debut album, Ryan Adams would be heralded as the brightest tousle-haired boy on the block. It’s a thin line between revelation and revivalism, but the Cardinals walk it with style.