Heaven knows why
Ryan Adams decided to release three albums in the calendar year of 2005. He's always been prolific to a fault, boasting about completed unreleased albums when his latest work was just seeing the light of day, but he never saturated the market with new material the way he did in 2005, when it seemed he was trying to break
Robert Pollard's record for most music released within a year. Grinding out three albums in a year is a marathon, not just for
Adams but for any of his listeners, and by the time he got to the third album,
29, in the waning weeks of December, he seemed like a winded long-distance runner struggling to cross the finish line: completing the task was more important than doing it well. There's little question that
29 is the weakest of the three records
Adams released in 2005, lacking not just the country-rock sprawl of
Cold Roses but the targeted neo-classicist country that made
Jacksonville City Nights so appealing. Which isn't to say that
29 doesn't have its own feel, since it certainly does. After opening with the title track's straight-up rewrite of
the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'," it slides into a series of quiet, languid late-night confessionals. It's like
Love Is Hell transported to a folk/country setting, ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine