ADAM GREEN seems to epitomise the idea of blowing hot and cold where this reviewer is concerned.
Personally, I found his antics with Kimya Dawson in The Moldy Peaches puerile at best and all the wearing of silly costumes and drinking piss milkshakes pretty cringeworthy, but his fertile solo career has thown up (excuse me) a career highlight or two, not least last year’s bizarre, but playful and concise “Gemstones”.
Follow-up “Jacket Full Of Danger”, though, provokes adoration and severe dislike in this writer in roughly equal measures and ends up an uneven and frustrating listen with the times you could embrace Green usually eclipsed by the times when you could gleefully choke him for his ultra-cleverness and ridiculously pretentious behaviour.
Let’s accentuate the positive to begin with, though, because most of the opening 50% of “Jacket Full Of Danger” finds Green and band on sparkling form, songs crammed full of ideas clocking in at barely two minutes and songs like the graceful opener “Pay The Toll” (“How do you need me so much? No amount of love ain’t gonna satisfy you!”) and the gyrating, Sparks-fronted-by-young-Elvis fun of “Hollywood Bowl” immediately sounding like some of the best things he’s done.
More good stuff comes courtesy of songs like “Vultures”, the crazed “Novotel” and the new single “Nat King Cole”. “Vultures” shows a slightly more patient and heartfelt side to Green’s frantic muse with neat, “Walk On The Wild Side”-style upright bass and brushed drums; “Novotel” finds Adam warbling about “fellers in umbrellas in the middle of the night/ whatcha gonna do wen the Mennonites bite” (no, me neither) before imploring us to “smoke crack like Isaac Asimov” (mmm) but gets away with it thanks to the song being only 1.38 in duration. The nagging “Roadrunner”-meets-Velvets thrum and rolling drums of “Nat King Cole”, meanwhile, could easily be classified as, er, be-bop jazz indie (!) but trust me – it sounds ace.
Irritatingly, though, just as he looks like going for the jugular, he seems to almost relish throwing it all away in a display of petulance worthy of Veruca Salt. Things begin to go awry with “C-Birds” (the Tindersticks jam with a Maori choir anyone? No, thought not) and the needle’s pointing dangerously towards ‘haywire’ with the mercifully short “Animal Dreams”, which sounds like the sort of thing Sparks would have rejected for being too silly circa “Indiscreet”. At this stage, you’re getting worried, but the rot really sets in by the time we get to “Drugs”. The title alone is enough to cause concern, but even Pete Doherty would probably draw the line (no pun intended) at lines like “my baby couldn’t shave me that day/ when my lady threw my drugs away.” Oh shut up, you tart!
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He rallies briefly with the Americana-tinged, apparently non-role playing “Watching Old Movies”, but it’s too little too late and the nadir is plumbed by the concluding tracks “White Women” and (wait for it) “Hairy Women” (no, I’m not making this up). The former is the worst kind of ‘Spinal Tap’ pastiche imaginable complete with GG Allin-scaring lines like “Fuck fuck me baby, now where have you gone”, while the perplexing acoustic blues of “Hairy Women” sounds like the kind of thing Jonathan Richman would have baulked at in 1979.
It’s a shame, because I’ve never had any doubt that there’s a monster talent lurking within Adam Green’s loins, and – when he’s not pulverising us with time-changes, show tunes, pretentiousness and lame attempts to shock – he shows glimpses of it again here. Mostly, though, he royally squanders it this time out and instead of a “Jacket Full Of Danger” he seems to be have chosen to wear the Emperor’s New Clothes. There’s no accounting for taste, is there?
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