Jacket Full of Danger
Rough Trade Records
et us now consider the musical oddity that is Adam Green, a 24-year-old New Yorker who, with three solo albums and Moldy Peaches work prior, continues to totter through his psychological minefields, genre cocktail to his smirky lips, in perky, psychedelic oblivion.
His surreal ditties, delivered in a confident but slightly hokey baritone, bring to mind a cheerier, less intense Jim Morrison with a tiki-bar backing band garnished with some genuinely polished string arrangements, courtesy of the album’s cellist, Jane Scarpantoni. His somewhat hodgepodge sound is the kind that invites critics to throw in a half-dozen comparisons that aren’t quite fair to them or him. Let’s not do that to Green, or to Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Elvis, Roy Orbison, or any of the other roster that one’s tempted to turn to in an understandably frantic attempt to describe Green’s sound or content. Let’s not do it to the free-associative lyricist Tom Waits or the adultly playful Jonathan Richman or the respectfully retro rocker Robert Gordon, either. Oops.
Let Adam be Adam and measure his weird, sweet, sick little reveries on their own merits, and we come out—well—ever intrigued yet still not entirely sold. Here smolders talent, for certain, a deeply poetic mind with a well-honed musical instinct, and a refreshing thirst for whimsy. He’s best when he reins himself in, as in the dime store-country ballad opener, “Pay the Toll.” “How do you need me so much? No amount of love could satisfy you,” he croons. “…Any kind of love is a needle in the hay.” There’s a straightforwardness that suggests he learned that for real, and the hard way.
It’s when he aims for what looks like too consciously clever that he distances himself and sheds our emotional trust. “I’ve been a deconstructive madman,” he gargles on the early-60s-sounding kitschy “Hollywood Bowl.” But it’s when he’s a deconstructive sane man that his lyrics curdle and coil most interestingly, and even his accomplished band hones its gentle sound around that quiet intimacy, as in the meditative “Vultures,” the most affecting and least affected tune on the album. “Golden fabric torn from the devil girl’s hair. Cheap medallions gleam from the vanity fair. Seen so many vultures, split so many creatures down there,” he sings. Now that’s a dream story worth telling, and requires no Vegas vibrato to tell it. The couching of his mental innards is couch-worthy, but moving too. “Fight me gladly, leave before the battles grow. So good night crazies, I’ll leave them feeling lazy, but I’m the god tonight.”
Don’t get me wrong. No artist so sage should write off artifice entirely. There’s some bold Brecht, as well as Beck, in the boy Weilling away the hours in stagy but provocative tunes like the stark sex sketch “Novotel” — “down in the factory when their faces blow a fuse it’s a miracle.”
And the pretension bests the hold-over juvenilia of the homage “Drugs”—“I like to do drugs. I like to have drugs. I like to hold a cigarette full of grass in my hand,” he proclaims. Ya don’t say.
Green seems more than a little eager to either churn or bail out of the rock history he sloshes in, singing, in “Hey Dude,” “Bob Dylan was a vegetable’s wife, game over hope you had a good life.” Yet he offers a protest song of sorts in “Hairy Women,” proclaiming, “I’m embarrassed by injustice that shuts doors on hairy women.” Speak truth to power, man.
The neo-Zeppelin blues bomb “White Women” perks up the ear in its contrast to the laid-back numbers, and gives guitarist Chris Isom room for a nice fuzzilicious solo. But the pointlessly, or pointedly, raunchy lyrics are a step back, though I concede a fondness for, “Rolling you lady is running me down, scrubbing the cages each town after town.”
Hard to reconcile that with the romantic earnestness of another of my favorites here, “Cast a Shadow,” which also offers some sunny Wurlitzer bursts from keyboardist Nathan Brown. “The sandman is giving me a special gift, a sleepy dream memory of our first kiss. Cast a shadow in my direction. Bring back shadows of your affection.”
But then man is neither angel nor devil, the French philosophe Blaise Pascal said. We’re all neither/nor, echoes this deconstructive madman. He’s working hard—too hard?—to avoid the bland confessionals of so many singer-songwriters. Fair enough. But is that really a worry for the man who wrote, "Fellas in umbrellas in the middle of the night, what you gonna do when the Mennonites bite?" I think not.
And it’s the more melancholy, self-searching balladeer within Green who seems to have the most stories to tell, and the best. The bravest artistry might be, in a case like this, the least obviously bold. Maybe the madman will let the poet out to play for a while in calmer pastures. Given Green’s cult following, especially in Europe, that might be a little mad after all. So that, at least, should comfort him.
-Alexander C. Kafka
