Premature judgements It is terrible whenever I buy any new music and I start listening to it I form an opinion almost instantly. When my first impression is negative I quite frequently do not listen to that music again and it gets buried in my cd pile. In many cases this is justified but in others it is not. Luckily I had not yet filed Ryan Adams second album Gold in my alphabetically sorted cd shelves from where it would have been very difficult to get back into the cd player (there are 1,000+ contenders). A couple of days ago I had dismissed it as mainstream and bland. I relistened and must admit that it is definitely one of the outstanding releases in this for me up to now quite poor year in terms of pop/rock music (another premature evaluation?). I won't go into details here but Ryan Adams album is very impressive. It is amazingly varied and consistent at the same time as each song is an entity which fits very well into the flow of the whole record. There are 16 tracks on the main disc (70+ minutes) plus 5 tracks (another 20 minutes) on the bonus disc. And there is no really embarassing track and hardly any really outstanding tracks neither. The music is in the songwriter folk jazz country rock vein. Very eclectic with influences ranging from Bob Dylan (Firecracker with some very competent mouthharp play), Van Morrison (Answering Bell) to Mick Jagger (the bluesrocker Tina Toledo's Street Walkin' Blues). The music only holds together because of Adams voice. It is so versatile. Even if Adams uses many riffs and arrangements from rock history (especially the 70s I feel) this guy has already created his own style. He makes me think a little bit of Jeff Buckley without the opera singer attitude touch (which I always hated). More down to earth and settled. I still prefer Adams first album Heartbreaker as more heart blood flowed into that disc. But even here Adams who is only 26 years old shows that he is probably THE songwriter voice in these times. Apparently in concert he is drunk and brilliant. One of my favourites from the main disc is the ballad Nobody Girl which does not get boring in the 9 minutes and 39 seconds it lasts. The bonus disc alone is worth the money as there the music is less polished and more like I would have liked him to sound after Heartbreaker.