I can't send it now, but PM me and I can get you a YSI later tonight or tomorrow.

well, how is it? me curious.

me too

I'd like some.

it's nothing like the releases from earlier this year. its very slow and i dont know if i like it. songwriting seems pretty excellent, just it's a lot different than the trad. country sounding records he put out this year.

YSI's have been sent to those who PM'd me

the song 29 sounds exactly like "truckin"
but i kinda like it.


and i mean EXACTLY.

Here's an early review from cokemachineglow:

There are two ways to see Ryan Adam’s 29. On paper, it looks awful: nine songs averaging about five and a half minutes apiece (only “Starlite Diner” is less than four), no Cardinals, more piano, and plenty of sad bastard lyrics, all leading up to the most subdued, depressive album of Adams’ career. Then again, that description fails to take into account Ethan Johns’ remarkable production, the charismatic singing, the strength and cohesion of the lyrics, and Adam’s abilities as a subtle solo performer. 29 is like neither this year’s Cold Roses nor Jacksonville City Nights, and while it references his previous work, the album is a wholly new artistic statement from the prolific musician.

The typical Adams song is about love and loss, and for that, one has no further to look than anything from his last two albums. All the same, it’s not as if he lacks the ability to delve deeper – “In My Time Of Need,” from 2000’s Heartbreaker, is the kind of poignant reminiscing expected from an aging Johnny Cash or Neil Young, not a man in his mid-20s. Likewise, tracks like “Sylvia Plath” hinted at the possibilities of more nuanced musicianship. On 29, Adams finally embraces his lyrical potential with graceful, fragile accompaniment.

The album opens with “29,” which, after absorbing the rest of the album, seems to be a tossed-off prelude or introduction. In a chronological sense the track should go last (Adams was 29 when he recorded the album, which he has claimed is about the years of his twenties), but placing it first creates an interesting commentary on the rest of his work. “29” isn't so different from his Cold Roses material, all chugging guitars and Grateful Dead aping, and Adams uses it to shrug off the diversion of his rock ‘n’ rolling to set the scene for the rest of the album. John’s production seems to echo this statement, raising Adams voice to the top of the mix and panning most of the instruments to the sides to differentiate the remainder of the songs.

While most Adams albums sound hastily conceived and committed to tape (they are), 29 appears to have logged a few months in the womb before birth. The lyrics have no needless profanity or lazy choruses. Rather, they’re full of connections and image-laden metaphors that make the album feel like a tightly cohesive work. Every song is a piece of the puzzle; “29,” the ostensible throwaway track, establishes the dangerous appeal of the reckless “night time songs,” and their outcome: “Cry me a river ‘til the morning comes.” Water will come back to haunt Adams through the rest of the album’s first half, leading to death or despair – often both.

“Strawberry Wine,” the album’s longest tune at eight minutes, goes down as smoothly as the object of its title, a languid, mid-paced waltz that bobs along with ukulele accompaniment. The lyrics wrap around the phrase “strawberry wine” and use the central image to tell several stories, all dark and painful behind the musical curtain. With only a verse/chorus structure and no solo breaks, it’s akin to the lengthy epics of Bob Dylan. With the production focusing attention on his voice, Adams sings with a dry, knowing concern that evokes the perspective of Claire, an old woman in the song who drinks strawberry wine “till it comes out her nose.”

“Night Birds” and “Blue Sky Blues” return to the water imagery, with the “night birds” singing the hollow night-time songs of “29.” “We were supposed to rise above, but we sink / into the ocean,” Adams sings, and the second time he does, Johns adds an electric guitar’s crunch and delay to Adams’ vocals, like a cliff tumbling into the darkness, and screams rising from the depths. The similarly piano-based “Blue Sky Blues” is sung with more resolution and without the sophisticated cymbal work of “Night Birds,” portraying a man doing his best to triumph over a loved one’s despondence.

If the first half is about life, moving from recklessness to concern to despair to disbelieving hope, the second side of 29 is about death. “Carolina Rain,” the album’s halfway point, is a narration of implied adultery and hushed-up murders, ending with the narrator’s death: “I was down at the banquet hall / when two guys came up, pretty angry and drunk / and I’m still here at the banquet hall, at the banquet hall / where the gun went off in the Carolina rain.” Water is once again paired with death, evoked by the striking image of a body lying in a pool of blood and raindrops. The gorgeous, almost ethereal “Starlite Diner” is Adams’ final, purgatorial goodbye. “Fare thee well, my old friends,” he sings in the chorus, waiting at the Starlite Diner for someone to usher him into the afterlife. “It’s a blowout / on a birthday cake / and I’m a birthday candle / floating in the lake,” his flame extinguished and submerged in the waters of death. “Where are you, it’s getting late,” he sings at midnight - just before the start of the new day – and his companion arrives just in time.

“The Sadness” continues with a narrator being called “beyond,” fighting against it with dramatic flamenco rhythms and a similarly operatic vocal performance. The second truly up-tempo song on the album, it would be a sore thumb if it didn’t provide an alternate side to the graceful acceptance of “Starlite Diner.” “The Sadness” is determined to show that it is very much alive, though the lyrics contradict it (“the change is happening and I’m almost gone,” and a reference to “oceans of ink”).

“Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part” and “Voices” take on a different, even more harrowing perspective. “Elizabeth” is about a friend’s miscarriage, but even without that contextual knowledge, the words speak volumes: “Every night it seems like there’s no tomorrow / not that you will ever know.” A beautiful instrumental coda ends the song, leaving the album to conclude with the comparatively harsh “Voices.” The quiet track adds a ghostly sheen of reverb to the vocals, which beg Elijah (the biblical prophet, who once raised a child from the dead) not to come. The bitter ghost is calling to a newly deceased child, telling it not to return to the living: “Step away from the light!” Adams sings in sharp falsetto.

Taken all together, 29 is a staggering piece. Throughout, there are clues and intricacies that could explored forever – the line in “29” about Adams’ friends having babies and considering him already dead takes on new meaning after “Voices,” and is Rose from “Carolina Rain” really Claire, the “old Irish rose” of “Strawberry Wine?” While the appeal of Cold Roses lies in its emblematic status – a two-disc distillation of quintessential Adams songwriting and composition – this is a level beyond. While Adams recorded this album as the first of his three albums this year, releasing it last makes it his defining statement. This is the death of Ryan Adams, the over-prolific and misguided, and at the ripe old age of 29, the birth of Ryan Adams, the craftsman, the artist.

this review makes me even more eager to hear this. damn him, but he might've put out 3 solid albums in one year! the hubris!

i like it two listens in. that's all i got.

here's allmusic's 2 star take:
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... azqj1rojaa

Heaven knows why Ryan Adams decided to release three albums in the calendar year of 2005. He's always been prolific to a fault, boasting about completed unreleased albums when his latest work was just seeing the light of day, but he never saturated the market with new material the way he did in 2005, when it seemed he was trying to break Robert Pollard's record for most music released within a year. Grinding out three album in a year is a marathon, not just for Adams but for any of his listeners, and by the time he got to the third album, 29, in the waning weeks of December, he seemed like a winded long-distance runner struggling to cross the finish line: completing the task was more important than doing it well. There's little question that 29 is the weakest of the three records Adams released in 2005, lacking not just the country-rock sprawl of Cold Roses but the targeted neo-classicist country that made Jacksonville City Nights so appealing. Which isn't to say that 29 doesn't have its own feel, since it certainly does. After opening with the title track's straight-up rewrite of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'," it slides into a series of quiet, languid late-night confessionals that all barely register above a murmur. It's like Love Is Hell transported to a folk/country setting, then stripped not only of its sonic texture but also its songwriting skeleton. Apart from "29" and to a lesser extent "Carolina Rain" and "The Sadness," these songs meander with no direction; they have a ragged, nearly improvised feel, as if Adams spilled out the words just as the tape started to roll. Now plenty of great songs have been written exactly in that fashion, but they never feel as if they were made that way -- or if they do, they get by on a sense of kinetic energy. With the aforementioned exceptions, the songs on 29 never have energy and they always feel incomplete, lacking either a center or a sense of momentum, nor ever conjuring the alluringly weary melancholia that carried Love Is Hell. Instead, it's the first time Adams has sounded completely worn out and spent, bereaved of either the craft or hucksterism at the core of his work. He would have been better off ending 2005 with just two albums to his credit and letting 29 co-exist in the vaults alongside The Suicide Handbook and his other completed, unreleased records, since having this in circulation adds a sour finish to what was otherwise a good year for him.

the few reviews i've read of this album have been all over the place. even cokemachineglow says this underneath the heading for the album review on the homepage: "The ideas and opinions expressed by David Greenwald in this particular review are not necessarily those of Cokemachineglow.com or its editors, or even most of its writers."

so much for 84% consensus.

still looking forward to it.

After about 4 listens, I like it. There's just something comforting about the songs for some reason. Certainly its not quite as good as his other releases this year, and it won't make my top 20 for the year, nevertheless i still like it.

finally had 1st listen. not as boringly somber as the main detractors reviewed. not the great album CMG says either, but nice end to his 2005 trilogy.

I think I'll need a few more listens before I can make a qualified statement about this record, but 'great' doesn't immediately leap to mind. It's not immediate, but with so many long songs I don't think that's possible. It's not quite up to Cold Roses or Jacksonville in my book, but yeah, not as bad as some were making it out to be with their 'shoulda stopped at 2 this year'. It's a December album for sure just like Cold Roses felt like the spring.