The Moment is Eating Us Whole- Revisiting Love is Hell, 10 years later

 

Love is Hell Part 1 takes me back to the Super Wal-Mart in Dubuque, IA, which is where I picked up a copy my junior year of college when I was supposed to be Christmas shopping for others—friends, family, etc.  And then there was Part 2, released just a little later on; that I got the day it came out from the hippie-owned record store in town, Moondog Music.

A decade later, even though now the EPs have been sequenced as a full album, including an additional song tucked in early in the sequencing, I’m still partial to the Part 1 tracks—they’re the strongest you could say. Or maybe it’s just because I heard them first that I have such a long-lasting affinity for them.

I don’t know if the idea of retrospectives like this has been played out or not. The poorman’s Pitchfork Stereogum is very quick to post pieces that remind you that yes, albums turn 20; and yes, albums turn 10; and yes, you’re getting old. Love is Hell may not be an “important” record, or a groundbreaking record by any means, but it’s something that I’ve managed to carry with me for ten years, so I thought it was worth revisiting.

The backstory behind the original release is infamous at this point—as is Ryan Adams’s contentious relationship with his then label Lost Highway. Two years prior, they condensed his breakthrough Gold down from the intended double LP into a single album with a “bonus disc.” The following year, they cobbled together bits and pieces from abandoned recording sessions and scrapped albums, releasing Demolition. Deeming Love is Hell not commercially viable, it was agreed it would be released as two EPs if Adams went back to the studio to record a different album—Rock N Roll, a sloppy set of garage rock influenced tracks, met with mixed results.

A sharp turn from the straight up alt-country of his debut Heartbreaker, and the 1970s A.M. Radio sheen of Gold, Love is Hell, based on the title alone, is obviously a dark record. The first portion of it can be harsh, and the whole thing is almost always somber. It’s heavy on guitar effects—shimmery tones and reversed notes. There’s a Brit-pop influence that shows its head occasionally—most apparent on the title track, as well as on the choice in covering Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” although Adams stripping it of all its mid-90s trappings, making it as haunting as possible.

Part 1, thematically, is incredibly desperate at times—a sad, drug addled, impoverished kind of desperation you can hear in “Afraid Not Scared,” “The Shadowlands, “World War 24,” and even in the final track of this set, “Avalanche.” The opening track, “Political Scientist,” has always struck me as including elements from Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of The People—although I have never been able to share this with anybody else. I mean, you try finding someone familiar with Ibsen’s canon that also listens to Ryan Adams. And no joke, you can find similarities in the couple mentioned in “The House is Not For Sale,” and the fate of Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in Beetlejuice.

Part 2, however, is jarringly different. Structured unevenly, the tracks are not “bad,” but they fail to match the overall cohesive feeling and sound Part 1 somehow effortlessly captured. It may have something to do with the fact that both sections of Love is Hell were recorded in different places (New York and New Orleans) with two different sets of musicians.

Ryan Adams- I See Monsters

The imagery of the second half is exponentially less desperate—many of the songs are nods to New York City, though sounding incredibly weary of living in New York. Again, these aren’t “bad” songs, but some of them are more palatable than others. The second half opens with “My Blue Manhattan,” a short piano-based piece, and a bit of a fan favorite, finding its way into Adams’s set almost every night on his winter 2011 “comeback” tour, before making way for more straightforward alt. country tracks, “English Girls Approximately,” and “Please Do Not Let Me Go”—both sound like things that would come later on with Adams and his band The Cardinals; the faux-Rolling Stones soul of “Hotel Chelsea Nights,” and even a little more Brit-pop (“City Rain, City Streets.’”)

When put together as one long 16 track album, Love is Hell unfortunately doesn’t really work—maybe it’s because there was such a long gestation period of roughly six months while the EPs were independent from one another. Or maybe it’s because they are both so different from one another that you really can’t put them together and expect it to work—even the odds and ends of Demolition work better structurally from start to finish when compared to this.

Within the Adams canon—Love is Hell falls at the end of his original period of prolificacy, beginning with 2000’s Heartbreaker, serving as the last thing he would do prior to the three albums he released within 2005. I feel like it’s not one of his better known albums—possibly because of how it was originally released, and then re-released in 2004 as a bit of a cash grab.

Ryan Adams- The Shadowlands
Ryan Adams- World War 24
Ryan Adams- Avalanche

I find that when I do listen to Love is Hell, which is still rather often, I stick with the first half—even after a decade, preferring the songs from Part 1 to those from Part 2, and finding that I grow impatient with anything that comes after the slow fade of “Avalanche.”

The packaging for Love is Hell shows a lot of stark, black and white images, along with a somewhat odd photo of Adam’s face on the front cover. Because the EPs came out in the winter, and because of the somewhat cold feeling of the music, I always associate Love is Hell with the wintertime, and it takes me back to those winter days my junior year of college in Dubuque, and to the memories of people that I used to know that I no longer do. Love is Hell isn’t the most that Ryan Adams has ever personally affected me, but I still keep some of these songs close, ten years later.