Love Is Hell is the fifth studio album by American musician Ryan Adams, released on May 4, 2004, by Lost Highway Records. The album was originally released as two EPs, Love Is Hell pt. 1 and Love Is Hell pt. 2, at the insistence of Lost Highway, who deemed that the album was not commercially viable. A full-length version of the album was released when the EPs proved to be more of a commercial success than anticipated. Love Is Hell features guest contributions from Marianne Faithfull and Greg Leisz, as well as Fabrizio Moretti and Leona Naess on certain bonus tracks.
Background and release
Love Is Hell was initially rejected by Adams's label Lost Highway, who had deemed its sound as "too alternative rock" and considered it not to be commercially viable. As a result, Adams recorded Rock n Roll in two weeks, which was released as his official fourth studio album on November 4, 2003, and the content of Love Is Hell was released as two EPs: Love Is Hell pt. 1 on the same day as Rock n Roll and Love Is Hell pt. 2 on December 9. The EPs were eventually combined into one album, which was released on May 4, 2004 as Adams's fifth studio album. The Oasis cover "Wonderwall" was released as a single from Love Is Hell in the UK on June 28, 2004. The album was released in Japan on June 27, 2007 with a bonus disc of tracks recorded during the same sessions as the album.
The track "The Shadowlands" was written backstage in Belfast on November 26, 2002, with Adams performing it as his opening song. The track "Anybody Wanna Take Me Home" was included on both Rock n Roll and Love Is Hell, although in different versions. As it appears on Rock n Roll, the song is 4:46 long and features a fade out and fade-back-in effect, whereas the Love Is Hell version is longer, clocking at 5:31, and does not include the fade effects.
Adams's version of "Wonderwall" was made available as downloadable content for the 2008 video game Guitar Hero World Tour as part of an acoustic pack in January 2009.
Composition
Adams described the album as sounding "a lot like Heartbreaker, but better and more severe. It's complex and it's damaged," and stated that it "was the record [he] needed to make." In a 2007 interview, he noted that he loves to play songs from the album live, and that the songs are "usually tunes that The Cardinals and myself get really excited about when they come up in the set."
Critical reception
Love Is Hell received mixed to positive reviews from critics. On Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the Pt. 1 EP received an average score of 74 based on 16 reviews, while Pt. 2 received an average score of 78 based on 12 reviews. Both scores indicate "generally favorable reviews".
In a positive review for Rolling Stone, Bill Crandall opined that Adams's label were wrong when they told him that Love Is Hell was "not [his] best stuff" and wrote that the album "is an exquisite portrait of the artist as a tired young man: tired of love, tired of fame and, most of all, tired of lonely nights spent in the Chelsea Hotel ". Writing for the same publication, Tom Moon called the Pt. 2 EP "seven riveting explorations that don't sound like anything else in [Adams's] songbook", although he felt that "they're not all stunners".
John Robinson of NME compared the way Lost Highway released Rock n Roll and Love Is Hell to "[having] thrown away the fruit, and chosen to heavily promote the banana peel", viewing Love Is Hell as "an album that actually is classic rock 'n' roll rather than one that can simply impersonate it" like Rock n Roll. Rob Brunner of Entertainment Weekly gave Love Is Hell pt. 1 a B+ and similarly criticized Lost Highway's marketing strategy, asking "what were they thinking?". He said of the EP that "the writing is tighter, the production cleaner, and the performances more considered" than on Rock n Roll and cited the "pointless" cover of "Wonderwall" as his "only real disappointment". Reviewing Love Is Hell pt. 2 for the same publication, Will Hermes gave it a B and wrote that "song for song, the EPs trump Rock n Roll", but felt that Adams gave off an image of "a scattershot chameleon instead of [...] an artist who digs deep".
