Ryan Adams
29 (2.5 stars)
One of the problems with being as prolific as Ryan Adams is a lack of quality control. On 29, his third album of 2005 and eighth in the last five years, Adams offers up nine formless songs that sound dashed off and tired, like the tail end of a musical marathon. Reuniting with producer Ethan Johns, Adams ditches his band the Cardinals, who backed him on his last two albums, and focuses on quiet, sparse arrangements, built mostly around acoustic guitar and piano.
After the opening title track, a rambunctious bluesy number, 29 settles into a stupor of long songs (some pushing seven and eight minutes) with little structure, full of half-mumbled lyrics about the pain of life in your 20s (the album's ill-defined conceit). One or two of these songs might have been fitting for a single 2005 album, but all put together, they're just lifeless.
Panoptica
Ahora Yo a Ti ... (2.5 stars)
Don't let the Spanish scare you; the 13 tracks by one of the founding members of Tijuana's Nortec Collective is surprisingly accessible, speaking either to Panopitca's skill as a DJ or the universality of electronic music. Or both.
Panoptica (Roberto Mendoza) mostly remixes others' work here in the collective's eponymous mix of electronic and traditional Mexican music. While most of the tracks are indistinguishable from anything north of the border, the Nortec remix of Calexico's "Güero Canelo" is astonishing in its blend of percussive guiro sounds and strains of Ennio Morricone. On the flip side is Panoptica's original "Demasiada Droga de Farmacia," a song so dreadful that it sounds like Art of Noise having a drug-fueled orgy inside of a synthesizer.