Last May brought Cold Roses, an over-long but intermittently lovely country-rock effort. Then, in September, Adams released Jacksonville City Nights, named for the town of his birth 31 years ago. Its country content was higher still.

The sound of Adams strumming and crooning again was big news for fans who had fallen for the troubadour of Heartbreaker, his 2000 breakthrough.

The North Carolina-born guitar-slinger had spent the past few years kicking against the genre that had made him a star. Indeed, Adams had probably become more infamous for his bloody-mindedness than his way with a plangent tune.

His Rock'n'Roll album, from 2003 was Adams' attempt to out-Stroke the Strokes. Love is Hell - an album released initially as two EPs on the cusp of 2004 - took its cue from the angst pop of the Smiths and the longueurs of Jeff Buckley.

Then there were the outbursts in the press, the nasty injuries (including a wrist broken on stage), his public relationship with indie film princess Parker Posey and the much publicised spats with his record company over the delays surrounding Love is Hell.

Perhaps it was a New Year's resolution, or just the natural swing of the pendulum, but as 2005 unfolded, Adams emerged as a more focused artist. He gave no interviews, kept quiet and let his songs do the talking.

Accordingly, his latest set arrives with only scant information - that the tracks were all written and recorded in the summer of 2004 when Adams was 29, and that the producer was Ethan Johns, the man behind the desk for Heartbreaker and Gold.

Without the rattle of the Cardinals, the band on his last few albums, 29 is an often intimate confessional, bidding farewell to Adams's twenties. There are stories too - like the fractured pedal, steel-laced ballad 'Carolina Rain' - but the songs loop back to the same, sombre place: Adams's interior landscape.

There's a feeling, played out through the first three tracks, that Adams - a legendary party animal - might be regretting his bohemian existence. There's the times when he was 'teetering, stoned, off the side of a building', when he should have died. (Mortality crops up again and again.)

'Don't spend too much time on the other side,' warns 'Strawberry Wine'. 'Let the daylight in.' His friends are all having children; he worries that 'If you want any flowers, you gotta get your seeds in the ground.'

This yearning for a life less out of it doesn't last, though. 'Night Birds' is both bitter and resigned. 'We were supposed to rise above,' he sings wearily, 'but we sink into the ocean.'

A groan of distortion accompanies the song's final demise.

The magnificent title track, meanwhile, is a chugging electric blues whose spurts of lead guitar and ragged denouement crown as good a song as Adams has ever written.

Adams's voice, too, is expertly parched and unexpectedly delicate by turns: working this hard seems to have done it good.

But 29 is nothing if not bleak. Even the jokes - such as the Spanish guitar folly two thirds of the way through Adams's 'Slough Of Despond' - are dour. 'The Sadness' is so melodramatic it recalls Jacques Brel, but not necessarily in a good way.

Burnt out on love and squalor, no one wallows quite like Ryan Adams - not even Pete Doherty who still finds the role of addled Romantic all a bit of a lark. With Adams, the fun has gone out of being a night creature here.