An Uncle Roddus Album review
Sometimes it's a bitch living at the bottom of the world. We miss out on so much good stuff. Most times it great living at the bottom of the world, we miss out on so much of the crap that goes on in other places.
Something like this I would almost kill for. A 15 LP boxset of Ryan playing an acoustic solo tour across Europe in 2011, playing material from throughout his career from Whiskeytown onwards including much of the material from his latest album "Ashes and Fire". This came out in physical form as a strictly limited edition Vinyl box set available only through Adam's web site, which does give us living here at the bottom of the world an opportunity. Unfortunately I only found out about this several days after it was sold out, not to mention the fact that I don't have a turntable to play it on. Still it would have been worth buying as an investment as the price of this set is going to sky-rocket on the collectors market, and that is not just due to it's limitedness, as the quality of the music is outstanding.
Once the vinyl sets were sold out, which has 144 tracks across 15 LP's and also came with a download card where you could access another 74 tracks, making this a very limited set of 218 tracks, a lesser version of 174 tracks has been made available for download from Amazon and apparently Itunes. The Amazon set downloads for $US108.49 at the time of writing. In the past I haven't been allowed to purchase MP3's from Amazon from here in NZ and frankly I don't like buying MP3's as they are inferior quality to CD's and I am not going to pay hard earned cash for files that I might lose when my hard drive crashes or what ever other disaster that happens regularly to data whether stored locally or online. So unless they happen to release this set on CD some time soon(and I think it would be insane not to release at lest a 2 CD set culled from this lot) then I will just have to listen to it(in it's whole 218 track form) in 320K MP3 from this site, http://exystence.net/blog/2012/07/02/ryan-adams-live-after-deaf-15cd-2012/.
So after finally getting the whole lot down, it didn't take long to appreciate that this whole set is of just totally outstanding quality and after loading it onto the ipod and spending the day listening to it on random play across all 15 concerts I just have to say that this intimate set of concerts is the equal of the solo acoustic sets I have of both Bob Dylan from the early 60s and Neil Young's recent releases of his solo concerts from the early 70s. Ryan is in sublime form pickin' his way through so many of his classics and his singing is the best I have heard it. I guess the only gripe is having several versions of the same songs over several concerts, but this is not an issue if you are listening to the concerts individually. There is some great banter from Ryan as well as some cool on-the-spot songwriting in response to audience comments or other stimuli. For Adams fans this is compulsory listening and I am in 7th heaven listening to this lot. Rating and outstanding 5+/5.
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