Adam Green - Minor Love

Adam Green has been releasing music for over a decade with The Moldy Peaches as well as writing independently since 2002. Known for his Curtis-esque vocals and wandering, cheeky lyrics, Green has developed a cult following and a reasonable critical respect in this time. Cue one pregnant girl with enough sarcasm to put Jack Dee to shame and Green has suddenly been launched into the mouths of painfully cool teenage girls everywhere as “...that one, yea with the girl...on the Juno soundtrack. God, I LOVE them”


Despite his newly-found status as a commercial commodity, there is nothing flashy about Adam Green’s latest effort in the slightest. The opening track, ‘Breaking Locks’ sets the tone for the whole album: muted guitar strokes and barely audible organs act as an ideal pairing to Green’s low-pitched, understated stammering. Even within the opening verse Green shows a lyrical obscurity which was intentionally absent from his earlier efforts; “When I took off my winter clothes, / my body looked like forty or fifty crows”


Minor Love is in no way a ‘big band’ effort. The tracking is limited at best to a few sparse guitars, reluctant bass lines and the ghostly echoes from where a drummer once sat. Green has never been known as one to call in the orchestra, and the fact that Minor Love teeters only between the boundaries of acoustic stumbles and low-fi murmurs gives the record part of its charm. Unfortunately, there are of course moments where he doesn’t quite pull it off. ‘Oh Shucks’ is a prime example of this: a song which could easily be conceived as a remix of overly distorted whale moaning and a broken Ataris.

'Boss Inside’, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the record. Green paces through the song on his own, retelling a dark story with the accompaniment of subdued acoustic picking. Here he is at his best, mumbling out moving lyrics through an atmosphere of surprising atrophic sincerity; “Somewhere there’s a Prince / and he likes to strike me down / I know I’m not the reason / I’m just the one he found”.

There are moments throughout Minor Love when the listener may be forgiven for thinking that Green has shaken off his fascination with the juvenile mindset completely. However, just when Green ascends to the (much-sought after) accolade of having crafted ‘deep’ lyrics, he hits back by inserting a chorus such as “castles and tassels and flatulent assholes”. This rebellious regression is entirely intentional: there is a sense that Green is actively fighting off the demons of conventional folk and all the ‘tears into the microphone’ associations which may accompany it. In fact, if you listen to the last track of the album carefully enough, really carefully that is, you can even hear Green giving the finger to Damien Rice from across the studio hall

(article published at www.supersweet.org 05/01/10)