Like any
Ryan Adams album,
Love Is Hell comes with a back-story, one that is carefully calculated to construct the enfant terrible's self-myth.
Love Is Hell was intended to be the official follow-up to 2001's
Gold -- the album that was not a collection of demos (that was 2002's
Demolition), or the recorded-but-shelved albums 48 Hours or The Suicide Handbook, or even his alleged song-by-song cover of
the Strokes'
Is This It. Longtime
Smiths fan that he is,
Adams teamed up with
John Porter -- the man who produced
The Smiths,
Meat Is Murder, and part of
The Queen Is Dead -- with the intention of creating his own mope-
rock album, hence the title
Love Is Hell.
Americana label that it is,
Lost Highway balked at releasing a stylized tribute to Mancunian rainy-day bedsit music and didn't release it, encouraging
Adams to record a different album, presumably one more in line with the label's taste. In the press and on the web, our hero spread stories about how the label claimed it was "too depressing" and "dark," thereby cultivating the myth that he's a maverick genius, while the label cheerfully countered with the defense that it just knew that our boy could do better. Eventually, a compromise was arranged:
Adams kicked out a new album, the self-descriptive
Rock N Roll, while releasing the equally self-descriptive
Love Is Hell as two EPs, the first hitting the streets the same day as the "official" album, the second arriving a month later. Five months after that, the full-length
Love Is Hell, containing both EPs plus
"Anybody Wanna Take Me Home" from
Rock N Roll, was released, negating the worth of the individual EPs (which were, after all, merely two halves of one album) and likely irritating legions of fans who bought both EPs.
While it took longer than necessary to have the whole bloody affair of
Love Is Hell released as its own entity, it's hard not to view it as a companion piece to
Rock N Roll, particularly because they're two sides of the same coin. In effect, both
Rock N Roll and
Love Is Hell are tribute albums, each a conscious aping of a style and sound, both designed to showcase how versatile and masterful
Adams is. But since he's a synthesist more than a stylist,
Adams, for all his bluster, winds up as a
Zelig-styled character, taking on the characteristics of the artists he's emulating -- something that can be sonically pleasurable, but far from being the substantive work of mad genius that he relentlessly sells himself as. If
Love Is Hell has the edge over
Rock N Roll, it's because it's more carefully considered in its production and writing, and he manages to hide his allusions better than he does on
Rock, where every title and chord progression plays like an homage. Here, he shoots for
the Smiths and winds up in
Jeff Buckley territory tempered with a dash of
Radiohead circa
The Bends. To claim that it is a dark affair is to criticize its milieu more than its substance, because the songs have the form and feel of brooding, atmospheric mope-
rock, not the blood and guts of the music.
Adams is fairly adept at crafting that mood -- anybody who's such a fan of
rock history should be -- sometimes relying more on a blend of attitude and atmosphere instead of songwriting. Such is the fate of a stylized tribute to a style with specific sonic attributes, but
Adams also does come up with a clutch of effective songs: the epic sprawl of
"Political Scientist," which captures him at his best
Buckley; the title track, which is nearly anthemic with its ringing guitars; the understated
"World War 24"; the gently propulsive
"This House Is Not for Sale," which would fit nicely between a
Julian Cope and
Morrissey track on a college radio show from the late '80s.
"English Girls Approximately" is an effective
Bob Dylan and
Paul Westerberg fusion, and the closer,
"Hotel Chelsea Nights," is one of his best songs, a mildly anthemic soulful anthem with vague overtones of
"Purple Rain." Nevertheless, it's telling that the best song here is a cover of
Oasis'
"Wonderwall." It's a well-done cover but not much of a reinvention --
Adams uses
Noel Gallagher's solo acoustic version of the song as a template, replacing strumming with fingerpicked guitars and altering the phrasing slightly -- which is why the song itself shines through so strongly: it resonates how the other songs are intended to, but don't. While it doesn't fatally hurt
Love Is Hell, since it is an effective mood piece, it does undercut it, revealing how
Adams delivers the sizzle but not the steak. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
