Adam Green
Minor Love
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Fat Possum
Juno gifted its audiences with so many endearing images, from the plucky heroine broadcasting the news of her pregnancy via hamburger phone to the sweatband-clad Paulie discovering a mailbox full of Tic Tacs. It was this film that brought the Moldy Peaches into pop collective consciousness, as Juno and Paulie sing “Anyone Else But You” to illuminate their happy ending. With the exception of this one-off revival, Adam Green and Kimya Dawson disbanded the Moldy Peaches, an on-again-off-again collaboration, in 2004 to pursue solo careers. In 2008, Green released his fifth solo album aptly titled Sixes and Sevens, an exercise in genre-jumping that both dazzled and bewildered its audience. Borrowing from country, doo wop, gospel, folk, rap and lounge, Sixes and Sevens could well have been the playlist for some sort of postmodern Broadway musical. Still, it was not an altogether twitchy album; there was something that unified these far-flung influences although critics and fans alike found it difficult to articulate what that “something” was. Maybe it’s just that Green was a weird enough guy – and, parenthetically, a good enough musician and showman – to be able to pull it off.
Adam Green’s new release, Minor Love, is a departure from the cultural Cuisinart approach of Sixes and Sevens. There is a quaint economy to the accompaniment on this album. While the majority of the songs are composed using standard guitar/bass/drum instrumentation, the overall effect is so compact that you feel like you could pack all of the equipment into a generously-sized duffel bag. “Bathing Birds” and “Don’t Call Me Uncle” are the two most minimalist tracks, the latter consisting of Green’s vocals backed only with a finger-picked acoustic countermelody. Adding to the low-key vibe of the album is the periodic appearance of clarinet interludes, lending a nerdy earnestness to the compositions. The same is true for “Give Them a Token” – with organ set to vibrato, Green tips his hat to the oft-overlooked genre of easy listening. They’re not all so unconventional; the more traditional rock songs like “What Makes Him Act So Bad,” “Goblin” and “Lockout” (check out the irresistible funk bass line) show us the oddly danceable side of Adam Green. “Oh Shucks” crosses anti-folk with pop punk using distorted fuzz guitar and sound effects that hearken back to old school mushroom-bopping Mario Brothers. My favorite lyric? “You’re a scumbag/ And I’m sad about that/ Oh shucks.”
Green plays it straight for most of the album, although “Cigarette Burns Forever” and “You Blacken My Stay” border on schmaltz, his baritone intonations conjuring images of Johnny Cash gone lounge lizard. One the whole, though, Minor Love comes off like a collection of anti-folk campfire songs. Essentially, it’s a guy with a guitar telling stories through song. Green’s narratives read more like folktales or hero adventures than stream-of-consciousness ramblings; “Castles and Tassels” uses fairy tale imagery as Rapunzel brokers a deal with a troll; “Boss Inside” is a Western-style ballad about the pursuit and demise of a destructive force; “Buddy Bradley” describes the life and times of an alter-ego. To describe this storytelling as stream-of-consciousness writing does not give Green enough credit. Many have compared his lyrics to those of Beck and Stephen Malkmus; indeed, these two could fill the role of fellow camp counselors. The difference is that unlike Beck, who tosses around non-sequiturs like verbal confetti, and Malkmus, whose vocals are sometimes buried under tricky guitar riffs, Green’s narratives, while strange, are quite linear and lyrics mixed to be crystal clear.
It was hard to guess what the follow-up to Sixes and Sevens would feel like; it was a thrift store of sound, Green donning musical styles like so many vintage accessories, sometimes clumsily, but ever fashionable. In Minor Love, he seems to have found a suit that fits. Returning to the roots of the anti-folk movement, Green collapses his sound down into something more populist yet still experimental. As the compositions take up less space, so too does the running time. As opposed to the 22-track opus of Sixes and Sevens that many found cumbersome, Minor Love tightened up to a total of 14 tracks, all of which are nugget-sized at under three minutes each. Armed with a decent synthesizer and a box full of percussion toys found in any suburban third grade music class, Green is refining his own sound without pantomiming those of the past. This is not to say that the album is simplistic or immature; Minor Love features plenty of variety and is not in the least bit predictable. But it’s controlled eccentricity. Green has reined in his crazies, and the result is something pretty great. It’s fun, funky and weird and unlike anything that’s being offered up for public consumption. In a culture where it feels sometimes like the Black Eyed Peas are the only band in the entire world and alternative is no longer an alternative, it’s reaffirming to hear an album with such peculiar creativity and newness. Minor Love, in its understated novelty, is a major success.
by Stacey Pavlick
