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 stars