Music

Ryan Adams

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

FOUR STARS

There's as much point in barracking Ryan Adams as there is in heckling Tom Waits. There's only going to be one winner. The bloke who told Adams to get on with it got his answer. With interest. And then some. Requests are likely to be met with impromptu songs built round a misheard shout and proclamations of love will be twisted into skits about Adams looking like a lion or some such.

The wayward but masterly Adams hardly needs encouraged to get a move on. He and his duck's bum-tight band were about six songs into the set before he paused to make an announcement. It was a rogue one, as it turned out. The music, however, was all honesty. Adams's songs, singing and playing, down to his occasional harmonica solos, all seem to come from a deeper place, somewhere that doubles as church house and road house, a feature underlined by the Hammond organ's warm, spiritual-cum-sexy presence and an upright piano's Sunday school-meets-bordello jangle.

It's music from an old school, or at least a previous generation, with a rootsy yodel underlining Adams's country credentials and the soul balladry of I Love You But I Don't Know What To Say joining the dots between, say, Paul Simon and Sam Cooke. And yet it clearly connects with the here and now. Everything is superbly crafted, every song lives in its own meticulously drawn atmosphere; with details such as the guitar phrases that oil the supercatchy Let It Ride and judiciously used pause-and-explode dynamics, it's easy to hear why a producer-musician such as Ethan Johns should call on Adams's production-arrangement skills.