Prisoner＜限定盤＞

エルトン・ジョンをはじめ多くのアーティストからの賞賛を集め、00年代～10年代を代表するシンガー・ソングライターの筆頭としてキャリア積み上げるライアン・アダムスの、17年2月にリリースしたオリジナル・アルバム『プリズナー』がカセット・テープで登場!※RECORD STORE DAY BLACK FRIDAY 2017商品

Picking up the thread left hanging from 2014's eponymous album -- in retrospect, his 2015 cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 seems even more of a detour -- Ryan Adams winds up diving ever deeper into early-'80s sounds and sensibilities on Prisoner. Such supple sounds are carefully constructed with producer Don Was, a professional who helps Adams articulate the AOR ideals he initially essayed in 2014. Prisoner sounds warm, open, and inviting, its welcoming vibes contradicting how it's an album born out of pain, a record written in the aftermath of Adams' divorce from Mandy Moore. Sadness haunts the corners of Prisoner -- it's there in the very song titles, beginning with the opener "Do You Still Love Me" and running through its aching closer, "We Disappear" -- but it's not a sorrowful record, not with its smooth edges and warm center. All of this is an outgrowth of the aesthetic Adams pioneered in 2014, one that he lent to Jenny Lewis' The Voyager, and the reconstituted soft rock suits him well: it’s a salute to the past and Adams always respected tradition. If the songs on Prisoner follow a conventional path of heartbreak -- a man sorting through the remnants of a broken romance -- the sound helps give the album an identity. Adams largely relies on cinematic classic rock tricks, a move underscored by how "Outbound Train" seems like an answer to Bruce Springsteen's "Downbound Train" -- toward the end of the record he starts to thread in a few spare acoustic confessionals, songs that play like subdued nods to his Americana past -- and that's the charm of Prisoner: it's not a record that wallows in hurt, it's an album that functions as balm for bad times. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

テイラー・スウィフトのアルバムを丸ごとカヴァーした『1989』(2015年)でファンを驚かせたライアン・アダムス。3年ぶりのオリジナル作は〈己の欲望の囚人になってしまうこと〉をテーマに、闘病生活やマンディ・ムーアとの離婚劇を連想させる言葉が目立つ。しかし湿っぽいのはリリックだけで、聴き手の感情を揺さぶる歌声と、変幻自在なギター・プレイの熱さたるや! 第2の黄金期到来を予感させる快作だ。
bounce (C)上野功平