Ryan Adams review – a straight-down-the-line stadium-rocker

It has taken Ryan Adams more than a decade, and he has finally done it: he's recorded his straight-down-the-line stadium-rocker. In contrast to the muted strum of its predecessor, 2011's Ashes & Fire, this self-titled album is monolithic, bombastic, urgent. It doesn't pay to listen closely to the lyrics, because what emerges is repetition: images of fire, darkness and entrapment that signpost generalised angst without articulating specific emotions. No wonder variations on the phrase "nothing to say" appear in three songs; two of these, Gimme Something Good and Trouble, sound equally generic with their broad riffs and barrelling vocals; the third, I Just Might, throbs like a swollen vein and ends with a shivery outburst that echoes Born to Run. This is a knowing album, an album that declares, I will rock you. Yet its finest moments are in its smallest details – the ghostly murmurs of Feels Like Fire and, in Kim, Adams's voice catching on the word "heart", as though his own is filling his mouth.