Show Review: Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

Ryan Adams has been opening shows lately with “Cobwebs” off the forthcoming Cardinology. At the Paramount on Monday night, it did the trick. The drums were big, fat, main-stage, festival-closer drums, all tom-toms and bass. The only thing that ever really topped them was the song’s coda, when Adams and guitarist Neal Casal took the chorus out drinking.

Opening with "Cobwebs" is pretty slick way of saying: The Cardinals are dead, long live the Cardinals. Particularly in this town, the name of Adams’s band for the last 4 years might always mean J.P. Bowersock and Cindy Cashdollar and the robust alt-country they introduced on 2005’s Cold Roses. Adams had flirted with a rich, full-band sound since leaving Whiskeytown, but the ’05 Cardinals were far and away the most genuine, novel, and complimentary he found.

Monday night’s Cardinals have played together longer than the original four, of which only drummer Brad Pemberton remains. It shows – they’re tight, particularly Adams and Casal. A perfect foil for the mercurial one, Casal is the straight-man in every sense – he’s tall, seemingly calm, and a static presence, anchoring the rhythm section on stage left, while Adams has a nice wide berth on stage-right to pin-ball around. And as a prolific singer-songwriter himself, Casal floats between first and second fiddle and back without note. Most importantly, he, along with bassist Chris Feinstein and even Pemberton, seem as apt compliments for Adams’s new direction on Cardinology as Cashdollar and Bowersock were for Cold Roses.

That new direction, or so it seemed on Monday night, strikes even further into Adams’s plugged-in rock tendencies than 2004’s much-maligned Rock N Roll. In sharp contrast to last year’s show at the Paramount, not a single acoustic guitar made its way onstage throughout the two-dozen songs. The set took little bits from every part of Adams’s catalog (save 29 and, despite requests, Rock N Roll) but the new-look Cardinals re-keyed them. “Come Pick Me Up” got a lot crunchier and “Dear John” kept its grace while losing the dour piano. Most songs just got longer and heavier, with “Off Broadway” – all 8 minutes of it - being the most extreme example.

Rarely, if ever, did it feel like too much, as opposed to past shows when, for example, Adams would take “To Be Young” and twist it into a hard blues. It’s certainly not the square peg/round hole situation that Rock N Roll was – there’s reverence in how Casal and company perform these songs, especially since they played with Adams on last year's Easy Tiger and previous tours when the aesthetic was more traditional alt-country. Even on “Magick,” the quickest and loudest of the new songs and the only certifiable fist-pumper, the band preserves a healthy dose of swing and twang, to the point that it didn’t seem too out-of-place sandwiched in between “Wonderwall” and “Let It Ride.”

The omitted songs from Rock N Roll might not have been a bad look, as Adams clearly now has the right band to keep up with his playing and his whims. However, the eight songs the Cardinals played off Cardinology seemed so much more apt for the format. Some lighter versions of the new tracks are floating around YouTube, and they don’t sound good at all compared to what the Cardinals are playing live. “Cobwebs” and “Crossed-Out Name” depend on the buildups and the sonic dives afforded by plugging in. If Adams had played the latter on an acoustic guitar it wouldn’t have stirred the crowd much, even in a sit-down setting like the Paramount. But he hammered through the first verse solo on his Strat and then led the Cardinals on a charge through the rest of the song. “Crossed-Out Name” seems to be the best song he’s written since Cold Roses, but that could just be because they played the hell out of it.