Wayward troubadours play it straight

Ryan Adams' new album is his 14th in as many years.

You wait for an album by a prolific Americana/alt-country figurehead with colourful back stories and past wayward lifestyles, and what do you know? Two come along at once.

Unfortunately neither the latest album by Ryan Adams (one of his plainest yet) nor that by Justin Townes Earle (one of his milder ones) are that great.

It's a nice coincidence, though, that we're discussing Adams' new album on this date. His post 9/11 album, Gold, sprung the single New York, New York which, with its feelgood mood, gave him an early commercial breakthrough. Adams had started off on a roll with his 2000 solo debut Heartbreaker - still arguably still his best album - and just kept on a-rolling, delivering another dozen albums by 2011.

So now there's this, his 14th in 14 years. Worth the wait? Sure, if you prefer Adams as straight-head rock guy, though not much of this hits the spots his electric guitar-powered forays of the past did.

If Adams' debut was Heartbreaker, the new one has him going the full Tom Petty - the likes of opener Gimme Something Good could have been lifted off Damn the Torpedoes and Trouble a few tracks later briefly threatens to turn into Petty's Refugee by way of Livin' on a Prayer.

Yes, the organ accompaniment of Heartbreaker's Benmont Tench does invite those comparisons.

But this also sounds like Adams' most West Coast album yet - if Gold was his ode to the good ol' Big Apple, then this one can feel like the 70s Sunset Strip revisited.

Especially on Stay With Me at the mid-point, which sounds so much like Lindsey Buckingham-fronted Fleetwood Mac, you sit there waiting for the Stevie Nicks harmony that never arrives. More Hollywood influences? How about that one J. Depp guesting, rather nicely if that's his solo, on Kim?

All that stylistic stuff might be something that intrigued rather than perplexed if Adams, the usually literate witty lyricist with a gift for yes, heartbreaking, despondency was on top of his game.

But here there's a repetition of can't talk/can't see/can't sleep verses that start to blend into one long whine and the feeling that this time he's going through the motions.

Sure, some songs poke through the wallpaper. Like howl-at-the-moon of Shadows and the tense swagger of I Just Might - and Adam's mediocre is what plenty of other roots-rock singer-songwriters can only aspire to - but a disappointment, nevertheless.

Initially disappointing too is the sixth album since 2007 by Justin Townes Earle, the son of hardcore troubadour Steve, who has followed his own neo-traditional path into country music while having been given plenty of lyrical inspiration by his absentee father and his own past addictions.

That's "initially", because previous sets Harlem River Blues (2010) and Nothing's Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now (2012) had him attempting his shotgun wedding of country and brassy soul and the results made for quite the honeymoon.

Here though, it starts out sounding like he's in down-tempo country-blues territory with a modest backing band and what sounds like plenty of first-take deliveries which can sometimes make Earle sound like Nashville's slightly wobbly answer to Billy Bragg.

But the charms of the 10 songs and their setting still eventually take hold. That's whether the apparently clean and sober Earle is celebrating riding shotgun in the rockin 'n' rollin' My Baby Drives or weaving his country croon through the mournful pedal steel on the likes of White Gardenias.

Come his Auckland show here next month, fans will have a few new faves to add to those shout-out requests.

Ryan Adams - Ryan Adams
Verdict: Self-titled but strangely impersonal comeback

Justin Townes Earle - Single Mothers
Verdict: Low-key offering from the country-soul dude

- TimeOut