Over on Ryan Adams' website, the alt-country vet has a fun little piece of news: "We're going to begin pressing ORION -- my most legit METAL record -- on vinyl next week. Have a listen to the song below and let us at PAXAM [Adams' label] know if you'd be interested in purchasing one."

The "legit" qualifier is in there presumably because Ryan has played around with joke metal before, primarily through his goofy web-only Werewolph side project. But the song streaming at Adams' site does indeed sound fairly serious, though it probably tilts more toward messy late-80s Pacific Northwest proto-grunge than toward actual metal. There's no soloing, no bottom-heavy riffage, and no lyrics about dragons, but Adams' scratchy growl/whine is pretty impressive. (The Soundcloud tag seems to indicate that the song is called "Electrosnake", which does push us a little further back into "joke" territory.)

Over on the site, there's also a poll where fans can vote on whether or not they'd buy the record. Whatever our intentions, we should all probably vote "yes," if only because the world's a slightly more interesting place when Adams is pulling unabashedly ridiculous moves like this one.

Click below to hear the stream of that new "metal" song.