Adam Green - Minor Love

Six solo albums on from The Moldy Peaches' indefinite hiatus, Adam Green has gone back to his roots. After albums that have offered lush strings, ambitious arrangements and, on last album Sixes & Sevens, a shimmering mix of swing, soul and jazz, Minor Love lands back in the anti-folk realm of his magnificent debut, Garfield. By playing almost every instrument on the record and recording it in one go, the New York-based artist may have stripped things back, but this is no regression. In fact, he shows an emotional maturity never before offered in his usually flippant and potty-mouthed lyrics. You see, this is Adam Green's break-up record.

Following the end of his marriage, Minor Love finds Green in introspective mood, and Breaking Locks is a downbeat start: "I've been too awful to ever be thoughtful, to ever be nice." If it weren't for that distinctive baritone croon, you'd struggle to believe this was someone more used to penning words like “There's no wrong way to fuck a girl with no legs.” However, this isn't a journey through tear-soaked self-pity, there are still sniggering mentions of flatulence in his often cryptic lyrics, but more so than ever, there are really interesting themes and stories which punctuate sadness with moments of optimism.

Jumping between acoustic ditties and occasionally ramshackle garage-rock songs, Minor Love may not contain the obvious, leftfield pop gems that have been scattered through his previous albums, but it is his most coherent record to date and finds a happy middle-ground between Adam Green's deliciously irreverent past and a new sense of humility and depth.

Adam Green - Oxford Art Factory

ADAM GREEN
SONGS
Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst, 16/12/08

Sydney-based Songs opened the evening sounding a bit like The Go Betweens. While the set was slightly too long to retain momentum throughout, the four-piece offered intelligence in their sound and there were some stirring moments, as they carefully built up layers with guitars, keys, drums, bass and male/female vocals.

Backed by a makeshift band including Operator Please’s Chris Holland, Adam Green’s baritone croon sounded delicious during opener Emily. Dressed in a pink leather jacket, skin-tight purple jeans, silver shoes and no shirt, the New Yorker had a maniacal look in his eyes as he danced bizarrely – like a cross between Iggy Pop and a child high from too much soda. Before crowd-surfing his way through Broadcast Beach, he gleefully informed the crowd that, on this, his debut Sydney appearance, he was really, really drunk.

While there were obviously lots of tunes from his latest record, the brevity of Green’s compositions meant he was also able to extensively revisit his back-catalogue. It was a high-energy affair as he rattled off Gemstones and Friends Of Mine, and occasionally he had to bring the tempo down simply to catch a breath. After he embarked on some more crowd-surfing (this time topless, as his jacket had long-since been discarded), the highlight of the night came when he stood alone on stage and performed an acoustic rendition of Mozzarella Swastikas. The cryptic nature of the lyrics were typical of Green’s style: “He fed my dolphin stars/Like you’d put gasoline in cars,” he sang. His band soon rejoined him as he played further tracks from his debut album. Dance With Me got the crowd moving with its suitably jaunty chorus and Baby’s Gonna Die Tonight ended the set with a bang. After an encore which included the nasty No Legs (“There’s no wrong way to fuck a girl with no legs/Just tell her you love her as she’s crawling away”) and crowd-favourite Carolina, Green left the stage looking exhausted.

The show was always fun and occasionally insane, but the craziness on offer shouldn’t detract from the fact that, above anything, Green is a fantastic songwriter who can segue so many musical styles with incredible comfort. It takes some talent to go from a Sinatra-style croon to a post-punk holler all within the same song and make it work. It may have taken this unique artist five albums to make it to Sydney, but it was worth the wait.

Review by Rob Townsend

Adam Green interview

ADAM GREEN ENTERTAINS ROB TOWNSEND WITH TALES OF TRANSSEXUALS, SWEATY GROINS, VOMITING AND GHOSTBUSTERS

“I like it when my balls get all sweaty. I like it when it makes this special smell. I rub it on my neck like cologne. It’s quite attractive.”

Adam Green is not your everyday interviewee. Within 30 seconds of our conversation beginning, the American indie crooner has already gone off at the strangest tangent. “Something compelled me to think that if I put cologne on my neck before I went to bed I would have particularly good dreams. It worked for a while but the only problem is they were all about transsexuals giving me blowjobs,” the lynchpin of the New York scene tells me in answer to a question I think had something to do with his upcoming debut tour of Australia. He goes on, “Anyway, with the cologne being thrown in the garbage, those dreams have dissipated. Now I just like ball-sweat on my neck before I go to bed. I dream about hockey,” he says with such disappointment that I feel compelled to tell him there are certain places in Sydney he can go if he would like to meet some real-life transsexuals. “I don’t really want a transsexual hooker,” he interjects. “I just want to have a lovely transsexual that follows me everywhere and is really pretty and cuddles me at night.”

Wrestling the conversation back to Green’s first visit to this country, I discover that financial constraints mean he’ll be without his trusty backing musicians for the tour. “If I brought my band – like, five guys – it would cost a fucking fortune to do just one trip, not to mention the actual tour,” he frowns. While arriving alone is not ideal, Green has excitedly recruited a temporary band for his time here, and it might contain a few familiar faces. “I ended up hooking up with those guys from Operator Please. They helped me to put a band together that mostly just involves friends of theirs, and some people from Operator Please might also play. Maybe I’ll even do some stuff with strings with them.”

Though Green has never played here before, either as a solo artist or as part of legendary anti-folk band The Moldy Peaches, talk turns to the last time I saw him play in London a few years back. This sends the conversation hurtling in another random direction. “Oh yeah, that was a fun show but a crazy, horrible day for me because the night before I had gotten food-poisoning. I’d never had food-poisoning and always prided myself on having an iron stomach. All of a sudden… holy shit. I threw up 500 times. This shit wanted to leave my motherfucking body.” Barely stopping for breath, he regales me further, his chatter mirroring his lyrical style: funny, leftfield, snappy and littered with expletives. “I was watching that show Cribs. It was [American actor/comedian] Pauly Shore’s house. He is such a sleazeball, lowlife jerk-off. He was showing me his schmucky, stupid house. Then all of a sudden I threw the fuck up over everything.”

Considering how Green clearly enjoys veering away from the straightforward question slash answer dynamic of an interview, I ask just how bored he has gotten of being asked about Juno – the movie which ends with Michael Cera and Ellen Page singing Moldy Peaches’ song Anyone Else But You. “I don’t mind it,” he shrugs. “I’ve been a fan of Michael Cera and Ellen Page for a while and I am excited about the movie but, yeah, who wants to talk about Juno all the time? I like Ghostbusters too but I don’t talk about it every fucking day. The Ghostbusters song is probably twice as good as Anyone Else But You,” he laughs. Sardonically, he adds, “But, yes, Anyone Else But You is wonderful. Kimya [Dawson] and I wrote that shit together and it was impossible. You could never probably fucking do it. Never. Nobody. Just us. And we should be paid for it so handsomely.”

And with that tongue-in-cheek outburst, our time together comes to an end all too quickly. No time even to discuss his latest album, Sixes & Sevens, which is a delightful journey through folk, swing, indie, jazz, and honky-tonk. Before he bids me farewell though, he temporarily ditches his delicious irreverence in order to look forward – five albums into his solo career – to finally arriving in Australia. “I wish Moldy Peaches had come to Australia,” he laments. “It’s weird to me that this is the first time.” Though it’s taken him a while to get here, he promises fans heading to Oxford Art Factory that it will have been worth the wait. “I do believe in an old-style rock show. It’s really going to rock the house.”

Adam Green - Sixes and Sevens

ADAM GREEN
Sixes & Sevens

With his profile raised by the part Moldy Peaches’ music played in Juno, the fifth solo album from New York’s Adam Green is gaining more attention than his preceding outings, so it is particularly pleasing that Sixes & Sevens is a fine collection of songs.

Following the disappointment of his previous long-player, the aggressive Jacket Full of Danger, Green rediscovers his charm as he dips in and out of a host of differing styles. His tongue-in-cheek, obscure lyrics are delivered with that familiar baritone cabaret croon, most pleasingly on the swing of Morning After Midnight and the Leonard Cohen-esque Getting Led, which comes complete with female backing choir. Elsewhere he takes a stroll through soul and jazz, while Exp 1 revisits the stripped back anti-folk style of his debut. Similarly, a duet with girlfriend Loribeth Capella on Drowning Head First is reminiscent of the Moldy Peaches at their most tender.

The beautifully produced, 20-song album is all over in 48 minutes, meaning there isn’t much meat to the bones here, but then we have come to expect that from Green, whose tracks are always so succinct that it seems unnecessary for them to last more than three minutes.

Sixes & Sevens really doesn’t play like an album but rather a random journey through the musical genres of the 50s and 60s. However, while its overtly eclectic nature makes for a noticeably incoherent body of work, a few of the individual songs represent some of his finest output to date, making this a marvelous return to form.