Pitchfork

Nearly a dozen albums in, counting Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams' shtick is that it's all shtick. If so much alt-country turned out to be a poseur's game of authenticity chic-- with a happy surfeit of strong songwriting, to be sure-- then no one embraced his poseurdom more openly than Ryan Adams. "I started this damn country band/ 'Cause punk rock was too hard to sing," he admitted from the get-go, while some of his less obviously contrived precursors were setting old Woody Guthrie verses to music. When Adams' 2003 Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell EPs wrinkled critical noses, it wasn't due just to their brazenly derivative artifice-- 2000 landmark Heartbreaker, after all, simply reworked Gram Parsons-- but to a paucity of songs that could break their gilded genre-exercise cages.

You could be forgiven for not noticing, but earlier this year Adams started writing good songs again. I know! Bearded and bespectacled (new first name "Grizzly" bwahaha), his fret hand rejuvenated after an onstage smithereening, the Artist Forever-Ever Known as "Prolific" hired a great new band, handed them a fully collaborative role, and laid down the surprisingly solid two-platter, pro-Grateful Dead polemic Cold Roses. Well slap me prose-purple and squirt dime-store gin up my nose, 'cause the second leg of Adams and the Cardinals' three-albums-in-one-year gimmickathon, Jacksonville City Nights, is even better-- succeeding where the equally grandiose same-day one-two punch of Rock N Roll/Love Is Hell Pt. 1 so bitterly disappointed just a pair of years prior.

Jacksonville City Nights reveals an Adams finally undaunted by his own conceits. Ostensibly named for Adams' hometown of Jacksonville, N.C., it's the troubadour's countriest effort since 1996's Faithless Street, only countrier-- lovesick sepia with pedal steel, string touches, and cry-in-your-unironic-Pabst honky-tonk piano. After the Garcia-esque sierra grassiness of Cold Roses, Adams vocals here conjure an unfaltering, fatherly pastiche of great country voices, from muddy Merle Haggard vibrato interspersed throughout to the Hank Williams yodel of "Peaceful Valley" or one-time Whiskeytown rarity "My Heart Is Broken". Though many of even Adams' most nostalgic lyrics could plausibly claim a contemporary setting, these 14 tracks exist primarily in the landscape of deathly sad river-bottom country, as inexorably grim as an unabridged fairy tale.

It's in this sense that Jacksonville City Nights is also Adams' most unbelievable album-- a lethal blow to the "based on a true story!" emo verisimilitude of so many singer-songwriters not named Dylan. It's difficult to believe Adams, productive as he undoubtedly is, when he sings of "working hard ever since I was a kid" over the chugga-chugga acoustic guitar of "Trains", or drawls, "Pay my respects to the company store" on upbeat first single "The Hardest Part". Norah Jones is equally unconvincing in their duet as she exhales, "I ended up with a house full of cats", with Adams providing high harmonies over Carole King ivories on one of the album's least successful tracks (their voices never quite mesh). Whether dreaming of an old-fashioned heaven or addressing a lover as "gal", Adams does less than usual to dispel accusations of affectation; this time, the songs' merit brushes most such charges aside. Besides, what did you expect, "Summer of '69"?

Adams' country-fueled freedom from the constraints of constructed authenticity permits him to plumb his darkest depths yet, and some of his most affecting. The suicidal miserablism of his 2002 Demolition's "Dear Chicago", itself essentially a dark sequel to post-Sept. 11 hit "New York, New York", is nothing next to the stark piano ballad "Silver Bullets", in which the narrator gets his gun because "I can't make you love me/ And you can't make me stay". Slow gravestone story-songs like erstwhile title track "September" are far more effectively mopey than Adams' mope-rock Love Is Hell. More disturbing, too: Adams' casual "sha la la" bridge amid the three possible deaths in "Pa" spreads the song's comfortable country-waltz stitching over the grisliness beneath, rewarding careful listens. Here Adams' narrators more often look at love from the other side, but they instill its memory with appropriately homespun life. "I could find her in a thunderstorm/ Just by the way that the rain would fall," Adams sings on the more Parsons-like "Hard Way to Fall"; "Met a dark-haired girl that the Mississippi moon/ Musta left by mistake one night," he recalls on "The Hardest Part" (that part turns out to be love, of course). Opener "A Kiss Before I Go" sets the stage for Adams' country departure, moving beyond its conventional one-shot one-beer refrain to envision "a place where nobody cries". Title aside, "Withering Heights" keeps it simple, Adams' voice falling to a whisper; choked plea "Don't Fail Me Now" (formerly known as "When the Rope Gets Tight") closes the album fit to hang. Only nondescript ballad "Games" fails to leave any impression.

If Adams ever lets his guard down on Jacksonville City Nights, it's on second track "The End", which many casual listeners will inevitably remember as "Jacksonville" for its double-edged refrain. Adams moseys through evocative images-- "Pentecostal pines", leaves that "burn like effigies of my kin"-- before a playful, improvisatory second verse (guess the missing rhyme!). Yet the fiction, the song, is the thing. After so many outings spent imitating others, it's tempting to see this progression to traditional country as Adams finally imitating himself; more accurately, Jacksonville City Nights is a well-lit snapshot of a talented mythmaker modeling his best honky-tonk garb-- and this time, holy shtick, the tailoring is almost impeccable.