Sober, mar­ried, relo­cat­ed to L.A. and back from a three-year hia­tus, singer/songwriter Ryan Adams gives us his first album of new­ly record­ed mate­r­i­al since 2008’s Cardinology and his first real solo album since Love is Hell.

Ashes & Fire feels like the newest entry in the line of acousti­cal­ly dri­ven releas­es that cat­a­pult­ed him to star­dom, but unsur­pris­ing­ly, Adams is more mature and more pro­fes­sion­al than ever before; gone are the self-pity­ing dirges of Heartbreaker and the indul­gent excess of Gold. The Cardinals helped rein in these ten­den­cies, but here Adams does­n’t even seem tempted.

Ashes & Fire is sim­ply his most coher­ent album yet, musi­cal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly. The imagery has moved to the west coast — and every­thing is a lit­tle hot­ter for it — and the lyrics are filled of the type of ret­ro­spec­tive nos­tal­gia that only comes from look­ing at the past not as bet­ter or worse, but different.

With Ashes & Fire, Adams has struck a del­i­cate bal­ance between going back to his singer/songwriter roots and start­ing fresh, and in doing so has cre­at­ed an evo­lu­tion­ary mas­ter­piece that feels both sur­pris­ing­ly new and com­fort­ing­ly famil­iar — prob­a­bly not unlike Adams’ own place in life. 4.5 out of 5.0 stars4.5