Jay Farrar: Sebastopol

Once silenced by the label machinations that tied up the final album of his former band Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams now seems determined to make up for lost time. With two solo records and the final Whiskeytown project all surfacing in the last year or so, Adams has been tough to avoid, and no less welcome for it. His solo debut, Heartbreaker, occasionally seemed a bit tentative, but there's little evidence of that on its follow-up, Gold. Though his roots remain planted in country, Adams continues to grow as a songwriter. Opening raucously with "New York, New York" and "Firecracker," Gold soon shifts gears to allow for delicate ballads like "La Cienega Just Smiled." "Tina Toledo's Street Walkin' Blues," a dead ringer for an Exile On Main Street castoff, points to one obvious source of inspiration, but mostly Adams lets his newfound love of soul and blues filter through his own sensibility. And, as the only songwriter to offer a romantic fantasy of dating Sylvia Plath (on "Sylvia Plath"), that sensibility is tough to mistake. "Well everybody wants to go forever, I just want to burn out hard and fast," Adams sings on "Firecracker." The sentiment may infuse one of the album's best songs, but it's worth hoping that he'll grow out of that ugly romanticism at some point. Though Adams is unlikely to have another year as productive (or at least as high-volume) as this past one, Gold captures the sound of an artist who, with luck, will stick around for a long time. Jay Farrar has not one but two bands under his belt. With Uncle Tupelo, he helped launch the alt-country movement that led to Whiskeytown and its contemporaries. With its successor, Son Volt, he released a classic debut (1995's Trace) and a pair of follow-ups that never quite matched it. While Farrar's first solo album, Sebastopol, doesn't quite mark a return to form, it's still encouraging. Backed by Gillian Welch, "Barstow" is a classic Farrar track that imagines a middle-American wasteland as a slow-motion apocalypse. Elsewhere, he applies his unmistakable voice to unexpected settings, filling out tracks with subtle sitar-like guitar drones and other unusual touches. Only a few songs connect immediately, but Farrar has few peers in evoking the atmosphere of a windswept winter afternoon. Even with that bleakness, here he sounds like someone who's considered the prospect of burning out hard and fast, and come out a wiser man for rejecting the notion.