Having tackled it obliquely on his track-by-track remake of Taylor Swift’s 1989 two years ago, Ryan Adams’s divorce from singer Mandy Moore takes centre stage on his 16th album. The sense of loss is all-pervasive on songs such as Shiver and Shake (“I miss you so much I shiver and I shake”), and the self-explanatory Breakdown and Broken Anyway. However, where such raw subject matter might once have found Adams tumbling into self-indulgence, here he turns in a set of fine, affecting songs, from the 80s soft rock of Anything I Say to You Now and Do You Still Love Me?, to the more introspective We Disappear, which recalls Paul Westerberg at his most intimate.
