ADAM GREEN - Jacket Full Of Danger

Thirty minutes.

In thirty minutes Adam Green presents himself once again with his usual nerve, shoving his naïf, otherworldly persona right under our noses, serving up that intellectualoid, scattershot pastiche his audience has grown accustomed to.

In thirty minutes Adam Green writes his most tedious self-indulgent pages, framing them within what are the finest musical pages of his career.

Contradiction is the soul of the record.

In his eccentricity, Mr. Green has always found people willing to listen to him, because his was a distinctive, unique voice, out of step with the chorus and with normality. Not that he's a fine pen of social critique, quite the opposite: Adam is a grade-A goofball who writes about nonsense, whores, masturbation and pubic hair. He's the type who's always in a dirty tank top, a free-time belching champion, a regular on the Friday-night bender.

His problem, and our good fortune, is that he manages to describe this weird world with a tone of sarcasm, of taking the piss, and with the snobbery of someone who knows he can make music. And here we get to the second point: "Jacket Full Of Danger" represents Adam Green's full musical maturity, striking an unexpected balance between Jim Morrison and Scott Walker.

We're not joking around here, we're not in the business of hunting for the next heir to anyone, and we're still sober enough not to entertain such heretical comparisons. Our man's voice has always travelled those back-street roads of blues (Morrison) and theatrical pop (Walker), even brushing up against the cultured-loser inflections of a Cohen finally reaching his terminus, sparing us yet another round of experiments that would have ended up as mere imitations.

It's not only the voice that has reached maturity, but also the musical stature of the New York singer-songwriter-of-all-trades. Now a refined arranger, able to blend the most disparate musical genres with top-tier nonchalance, Adam Green finds his favourite habitat in orchestrations pumped up with strings. Listening to him, distant and detached, the music sounds cultured, somewhere between operetta and jazz, between blues cabaret and intellectual singer-songwriting.

Coming briefly to specifics, "Pay The Toll" acts as the musical bridge with the previous "Gemstones": pop songwriting with a strong focus on catchy melody — one of the few concessions our Green makes to easy listening, to a hook you can sing and sing again.

C-Birds is a sickly blues with Eastern inflections and a drunk, paranoid finale in the vein of Lanegan; "Nat King Cole" is the album's first single and one of the longest tracks at two and a half minutes: it strikes for how brazenly Doors-like it is, voice and keyboard runs included.

"Cast A Shadow" could have been written by Calvin Johnson twenty years ago, a minimal melody repeated ad libitum. The album's double closing is entrusted to "White Women", which settles back into that noisy, sickly bluesy territory somewhere between Eels and Lanegan again, and to the delicate, carefree cabaret of "Hairy Women".

Summing up, Adam Green renews his musical formula, squaring the circle of his approach. Less varied and less melodic than his previous work, "Jacket Full Of Danger" is the maturity of a twenty-five-year-old who doesn't want to grow up, but who risks, in the long run, becoming boring. For now, we'll settle for that.

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06/04/2006