Most rock stars start off as fans. They borrow ideas, mimic styles and plunder archives until they find a performing identity of their own. Ryan Adams, however, seems to be doing the opposite.

Since he began his solo career three years ago with Heartbreaker, an album of understated, alt.country magic conjured up in Nashville, he has gradually turned into America’s answer to Noel Gallagher — a brash, brazenly derivative songwriter, so high on his own myth that he simply doesn’t care who rumbles him.

On the face of it, Rock N Roll shows tremendous vitality and valiant commitment to old-fashioned, guitar-band craft. Recorded with help from drummer Johnny T Yerington and hardly anyone else, tracks like Burning Photographs and She’s Lost Total Control find Adams playing arena-strength riffs like a man possessed. But possessed by what?

Adams, who will be 29 on Wednesday, is inspired by the songs and spirit of an older generation. “It’s 1974/ Just like the day I was born,” he yells in 1974, a number with a close resemblance to the Rolling Stones staple You Got Me Rocking. Do Miss America is a great tune that would sit comfortably on any Nirvana album but for its rather unworthy lyric. So Alive is a less appealing number that takes the windswept choruses and galloping guitar arpeggios of U2 as its template. And on Shallow, an exuberant, retro-rock chug, Adams manages to sound like Oasis copying T Rex as he romps into the home straight with the line “You gotta do what you do/ Gotta say what you say.” When he chooses such ostentatiously second-hand titles as Wish You Were Here (not Pink Floyd) and The Drugs Don’t Work (not Verve), you wonder if he is having some kind of private joke.

Spotting the references is one thing. But where is Adams himself? The lyrics speak of stardom, boredom, teenage sex and casual drug-taking with a world weary air that isn’t entirely convincing. “I was shooting in the back of the car/ When the windows smashed on the police cars/ I was swimming through the streets of New York/ With my cocaine dagger and throats to cut,” he sings. You might be more disposed to forgive him these lurid flights of fancy if he had bothered to think up some decent rhymes.

On only two songs does he reveal a real self, as opposed to the swaggering, 1970s rock star dude he sends out to face the world. Note To Self: Don’t Die, a number co-written with the actress Parker Posey (with whom Adams has been romantically linked), is an enjoyable, old-school rocker in which he reminds himself that the best way to get through all this is “Don’t change, just lie”.

And the title track, Rock N Roll, a starkly unadorned vocal and piano interlude, provides the album’s one moment of introspection as he finally fesses up to his personal insecurities: “Everybody’s cool playing rock’n’roll/ I don’t feel cool at all.”

No one expects searing honesty, least of all from a rock’n’roll star. And whatever its provenance, Rock N Roll undoubtedly rocks and rolls. But that doesn’t excuse Adams from the increasingly pressing need to move on from his sponge-like fascination with the past and settle on a voice of his own.

(Lost Highway)

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