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Ryan Adams & The Cardinals - Cold Roses (Lost Highway)

As a song title, "Sweet Illusions" really sums up the latest effort by Ryan Adams. What a sweet illusion his career has been from Whiskeytown to the present day, over eight years. He's been deemed a bad boy to a heart-on-his-sleeve songwriter. He is a musician of clear promise trapped by the walls of his own creation. On the double album Cold Roses, Adams laments from one song to the next without ever reaching for a new box of Kleenex.

Double albums always come with some dodgy turf. The excess of material tends to raise the argument that some songs could have been cut to make a more focused single album. Adams has had some trouble maintaining a tight aim since 2002's Demolition, a collection of unreleased demos. In 2003, Adams readied an album called Love Is Hell, but his record label told him to go back to the drawing board. Instead, Adams released the abysmal Rock N Roll--a jean jacket, amped up, blood, sweat and beer affair that came nowhere near its rock star diva persona. At the same time, Adams had his way by having Love Is Hell broken into two EPs, almost as if saying to listeners, "Here's what I really wanted to release but was told is wasn't good enough." Just last year the Love Is Hell EPs were released as a full album, and, according to Adams, Cold Roses will be the first of three releases Adams has in store for this year. Call it massive creative output or just clearing out the closet.

But Cold Roses is nothing more than a frigid album with very few moments of warmth. The second "Magnolia Mountain" begins disc one to the end of "Friends" on disc two there's never the sense of cohesion. Both albums run in a very stark, lackluster pace with Adams taking a slow drag with every word he sings. It's almost like Adams recorded the whole album on fifteen minutes of sleep. Over eighteen songs, Adams hits a redeemable note on "When Will You Come Back Home." Sure, it's still one song in a catalog of songs that deal with the same story: the brokenhearted soul yearning for the unattainable girl, drowning sorrows at the bar. Maybe that's forever Adams' forte as a songwriter. An album's worth of "When Will You Come Back Home" may not have made for a better album, but spreading the magic of that song across the rest of the album wouldn't have hurt.

Whether or not he'll ever expand his creative scope in the manner of which songwriters like Paul Westerberg, Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy have done in their careers--artists often said to be Adams' measuring stick--Adams remains at the end of the bar near the jukebox, close enough to select the usual tunes.