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Cardinology Image
Metascore
72

Generally favorable reviews - based on 24 Critic Reviews What's this?

User Score
7.9

Generally favorable reviews- based on 28 Ratings

  • Summary: Ryan Adams returns with his band The Cardinals to release its latest album produced by Tom Schick.

Top Track

Fix It
What makes them walk away, after all these years? These years of learning in the hard way By the lessons from the tears I know it's not a game But it... See the rest of the song lyrics
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 17 out of 24
  2. Negative: 0 out of 24
  1. Ryan Adams and his backing band The Cardinals have got their sound down to a science, all right: Cardinology, as embodied by their fourth album in as many years, is a precisely calibrated method of creating cool, reflective pools of vocal harmonies and pedal steel, accented from time to time by fiery electric-guitar licks.
  2. If only a few of the tracks rise to the greatest heights of which Adams is capable--like the poignant closing salute to sobriety, 'Stop'--the rest remain impressive pictures of craftsmanship.
  3. Cardinology is a classic-rock record to the bone, nodding to influences that Adams has conjured before but never so well.
  4. 70
    Cardinology lays even deeper into the language of rehabilitation, grace and renewal.
  5. If this album is a misstep, it’s a minor one with more than a few ?moments of redemption--the latest missive from a talented group of musicians likely to find their way back to the path before long.
  6. 60
    Ultimately, Cardinology serves as another minor indictment of Adams’ famously lackadaisical internal editor. Neveretheless, it is still, almost infuriatingly, a stretch better than most people at their best.
  7. Following those pleasantly modest, Paste-worthy beginnings, however, Adams draws the blinds entirely and Cardinology starts sliding into self-indulgent banality of a sort so pinched and uninviting it makes Conor Oberst seem like Will Rogers.

See all 24 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of
  2. Mixed: 0 out of
  3. Negative: 0 out of