Easy Tiger

iTunes Review

Ryan Adams released three albums in 2005, issued a ton of musical and parodic scraps at his website in 2006, and finally returned in June 2007 with his ninth proper album, the deliberately restrained Easy Tiger.  Backed by the Cardinals, it’s 13 tunes, all but one under the three-and-a-half minute mark, kept stylistically close to the alt.country rock for which he is best known and appreciated (“Two,” “Everybody Knows,” “I Taught Myself How To Grow Old”). Adams occasionally indulges his Jeff Buckley vocal flights of fancy for the four-plus minute “The Sun Also Sets” and the years have mellowed him somewhat, making his presentations occasionally less the light shuffling Nashville Skyline Bob Dylan than American Beauty-era Grateful Dead. But he’s still lyrically precise and the orchestrated drama fueling “Rip Off” recalls the ambition of the mid-70s countrypolitan sound, while the Nashville-meets-L.A. ‘70s radio pop of “Two Hearts” bounces to the easy sway of the Eagles under the influence of Roy Orbison.