KEY POINTS:
It's been more than a year since we had a Ryan Adams album. After eight in the previous five years - of variable length, focus and quality as the years wore on after 2000's great solo debut Heartbreaker and 2001's splendid Gold - it seems to have proved
a refreshing pause.
Last year Adams kicked the drink and drugs which had earlier made his reputation as a guy attempting to get "misunderstood country rock artist" inscribed on his gravestone before his time.
But Easy Tiger is no wallow in rehab pity, just the album he needed to make about now: something to stick all that notoriety to - funnily enough it's his last for his contract with Lost Highway, the American roots-rock label long regarded as artist-friendly, except by Adams.
And it's one which reminds how good he is as a writer and a singer, how good his faithful backers the Cardinals are to his songs and how direct and affecting they can be. That's even when they waltz in dressed in tasselled buckskin or nudie suits and proceed to water down every beer in the joint with tears of loneliness, despair, self-loathing and various other fun moods.
Melancholy most of it may be, but it twangs brightly, especially at the start when honky tonk closing-time opener Goodnight Rose folds into Two, with Adams' plaintive tenor over crisp acoustic guitars with pedal steel, and Sheryl Crow helping on the sad high notes.
Adams does rock - minus the country - neatly on Halloweenhead, a pre-rehab anthem ("head full of tricks and treats") of big brawny chorus, chugging guitars, new wave synths, cathedral bells and a very cool bit where he shouts out "guitar solo!" only to be answered by a squiggly sound which is not quite what the doctor ordered.
And on the later Two Hearts it sounds like Adams is again tapping into his seemingly incongruous enthusiasm for the Smiths, with a lyric carried by a plaintive swoon of a tune that Morrissey would have been proud of.
On the dramatic album centrepiece The Sun Also Sets, Adams successfully veers into the grandiose and vocally flamboyant territory near Rufus Wainwright and Jeff Buckley. But much of Easy Tiger is a refreshingly direct contemporary and neatly scuffed alt-country album. It might get a little too, well, O Brother Where Art Thou for its own good on Pearls On a String, but the equally yeeha Tears of Gold, about Mary Anne and Laura Lee and their God-fearing family, is a homespun gem.
Add the echoes of Harvest-period Neil Young on Off Broadway - his best New York song since his hit New York, New York - and the heart-bruised closing I Taught Myself How to Grow Old and you've got the best Ryan Adams album since he began his haphazard solo career.
The local Adams faithful gathering to see him and his band for the first time in Auckland next month will be pleased to know that not only is Easy Tiger a real Heartbreaker, it's as good as Gold.
Label: Lost Highway / Universal
Verdict: American alt-country leading light heads here in very fine fettle