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Love Is Hell | 
| Artist: Ryan Adams
Label: Mercury Records Ltd (London)
Category: Music
List Price: £5.99
Buy New: £3.87
You Save: £2.12 (35%)
New (55) Used (9) from £3.38
Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 2921
Media: Audio CD
Running Time: 68
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 000170202
UPC: 602498623251
EAN: 0602498623251
ASIN: B0001ZMX68
Release Date: May 3, 2004
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Tracks:
| • | Political Scientist | | • | Afraid Not Scared | | • | This House Is Not For Sale | | • | Anybody Wanna Take Me Home | | • | Love Is Hell | | • | Wonderwall | | • | The Shadowlands | | • | World War 24 | | • | Avalanche | | • | My Blue Manhattan | | • | Please Do Not Let Me Go | | • | City Rain, City Streets | | • | I See Monsters | | • | English Girls Approximately | | • | Thank You Louise | | • | Hotel Chelsea Nights |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
Welcome back to Ryan Adams the poet--previously missing presumed dead, or at least seriously wounded by the hand of his own gutless record label. Love Is Hell combines both previous EPs of the same name, originally released as such by Lost Highway, wary of the lack of mainstream pop Adams had delivered them (causing the slighted musician to knock up the throwaway yet still utterly indispensable Rock 'n' Roll). Here we find four songs chopped (none missed) and one added--the world-weary yet utterly romantic "Does Anybody Want To Take Me Home" from Rock 'n' Roll (potential single material, cut from the same cloth as "This House Is Not for Sale"). Love Is Hell is a desolate, artistically ambitious, yet strangely moving piece of work that visits someplace on the edge of town ("Political Scientist") and his own harsh self examination ("God, what have I been drinking?" he asks in the title track). This emotional fug sometimes clears to reveal a still beating, if bruised heart ("This House Is Not for Sale") although occasionally it can become too much (the pedestrian "My Blue Manhattan", and the aimless "Avalanche"). Aside from "Afraid Not Scared" (which smacks of Radiohead's "Subterranean Homesick Alien") the whole thing sounds like a silent motif for the quiet desperation of life, like a single maudlin violinist playing on a tube platform at midnight. That and a smoky, sublime cover of "Wonderwall" makes for a near-perfect Ryan Adams record. --Ben Johncock
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Let the man alone October 30, 2008
What the hell is the amazon reviewer listening to - Avalanche aimless? Absolute tosh and nonsense. Great song. The Oasis cover? Redundant. Always skip past it. The rest? absolute bloody genius. Record companies? God bless the internet.
 really, really good June 25, 2008
buy it, if only for the last 60 seconds of "English Girls Approximately", which is utterly lovely.
The man has a rare talent, let's hope his label don't stifle it again
A beautiful album April 4, 2008
My first taste of Ryan Adams' music was through the Cold Roses double album and while I could appreciate many of the tracks there was nothing that made me want to explore further. I stumbled across Love is Hell in a charity shop and intrigued by the cover version of Wonderwall decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did. There isn't a weak track here and the music and lyrics are extremely powerful creating one of the most moving albums I have heard. It is a very dark album though certainly not depressing. Thanks to Love is Hell I have now acquired much of Adams' back catalogue. This album is for me the greatest piece of work which Adams' has so far achieved. Heartbreaker is also highly recommended.
start here April 19, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
this is the place to start if you are interested in ryan adams.
most of his stuff takes a while to work its magic, but this is pretty immediate.
its also probably his best album.
start here and you are in for a real treat.
for all fans of great music.
His masterpiece. February 10, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
On more than one occasion, record labels and PR people have made the wrong choice. The Rolling Stones were signed to Decca entirely because the man who signed them didn't want to make the same mistake twice, having previously passed on the Beatles. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album is famous both as their masterpiece, and as the album that Warners paid for twice, because Wilco made it, Reprise rejected it, and then Nonesuch bought it. It's now their biggest seller.
And so it is with Love Is Hell by wayward alt-country wonderboy Ryan Adams. When he first made it, Lost Highway rejected it as too depressing, instead putting it out as two ridiculous album-length EPs, while Adams responded by recording the sporadically great but mostly awful Rock 'n' Roll album. Then, the following year, his label relented, finally allowing Adams to release the album 'as he intended it.' His label are morons.
The release of this was somewhat of a low blow for Adams fans because they already have all but one of these songs on the EPs, and it's a blow for Adams himself because it proves how little his label apparently respects his opinion. That is irrelevant to the quality of the music however - and the music is the best collection he's produced to date.
The single parallel you can draw with his previous work is that the chiming, twangy guitar tone on show here is the same one that he employed on Rock 'n' Roll. Other than that, this otherworldy album is the most unique thing in his catalogue. Opener 'Political Scientist' is quite simply the finest song he's ever written, an utterly stunning, sweeping epic. Nothing here equals it, but it's pretty much uniformly great.
His famous cover of Oasis' 'Wonderwall' is lovely, all subtle acoustic guitars and atmosphere rather than the great, but blunt, original. 'Afraid Not Scared' is lovely, a fine vocal on Adams' part holding it together, ditto for 'Does Anybody Want To Take Me Home?'. 'This House Is Not For Sale' canters along on a well-strummed acoustic guitar.
This whole album is based on great songs which are as much about mood as they are about melody. This album is dark, depressing, claustrophobic, his label was right about that, and as always is slightly overlong; but it's also heartbreaking, beautiful, and the greatest album Adams has yet released.
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