REVIEW | Bryan Adams, Room Service | Polydor Records (Universal), ** 1/2.

Bryan Adams’ Room Service, 2004.

There’s something comforting about a musician like Bryan Adams. While he may not being doing anything particularly innovative or interesting these days, his ability to continue to produce the sort of music he was making 15 years ago is at least relaxing. If you’re not a fan, you probably never will be, but if you are, Adam’s new album Room Service should be just what you’ve been hoping for (and exactly what you expected).

Somewhere between 1991’s Waking Up The Neighbours and 1998’s On a Day Like Today, Bryan Adams stopped producing enough of the pop rock that made him famous in favour of cheesy ballads and easy listening nightmares. Thankfully, Room Service is a departure from this.

By no means it is the classic rock of 1984’s Reckless, but it’s not going to put you in a sugar coma either.

With Room Service, Adams revisits his pop-rock roots and combines that sound with his more recent ballad-driven work. The result is a pleasing, if rather clichéd album of upbeat tracks that are perfectly fine, but unlikely to ever climb the charts.

While it leans towards the lyrically lame, if you can manage to squelch your contemporary criticism, the whole thing is really quite sweet. It may be a record full of love songs, but at least they’re fun love songs.

This album proves that after almost 25 year on the music scene, Bryan Adams is still a down-home Canadian boy at heart.

He’s the kind of guy who writes songs about love, his guitar, and the open road (Track 6). At times he does regress to the icky – particularly with the track Flying – but all in all, Room Service is basic Bryan Adams, filled with his trademark raspy vocals and melodic hooks. There’s nothing particularly complicated or noteworthy here, but for fans, Room Service will feel like comfort food. – Jen Selk, Vancouver Sun.

A version of this Bryan Adams, Room Service review originally published in the Vancouver Sun newspaper on September 21, 2004. See below.

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Published September 21, 2004 in The Vancouver Sun.