Send "Adam Green " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmasters |
 The Moldy Peaches -- the NYC duo of Adam Green and Kimya Dawson which went on hiatus earlier this decade for its members to pursue solo careers -- took a casual, anything goes approach to songwriting. Their songs sound like they were made up on the spot, and most of the time it's because they were. Adam Green's three solo albums, in contrast, find him increasingly laboring over his songs. Or at least he labors over the musical side of his songs; they seem carefully planned and arranged. The lyrics still come across like an expressway into his brain... and it's a very interesting brain, filled with absurd thoughts, not to mention fixations on prescription drugs, crack-smoking, and human anatomy. Gemstones, Green's third solo album, has a song which starts with the line, "Carolina, she's from Texas / red bricks drop from her vagina," and another song titled "Choke on a Cock". Forget for a second that "Carolina" has a perfectly catchy melody and "Choke on a Cock" has pointed, if haphazard, digs at George W. Bush and celebrity worship, these lyrics and titles are an example of why Green will forever be branded "juvenile", no matter how mature his music gets. Not that Gemstones' music is "sophisticated" like that on Green's very Nick Drake-influenced 2003 album Friends of Mine. That album's strings have been replaced with organ, its lightness turned into a grittier but at the same time more showy type of playfulness. He's gone for a sound that's somewhere between '50s and '60s rock and musical theatre, halfway between Buddy Holly and Broadway. On Gemstones Green sings like he's been making the nightclub rounds for decades. You can hear the wink in his voice -- not an 'I'm putting something over on you' wink, but a 'hey there baby, join me for a martini later' Las Vegas wink and smile. What makes that funny is that he doesn't have much of a singing voice, by most 'professional' standards, and that his voice is too deep and his singing style too talky for him to be any kind of romantic crooner. It's like your next-door neighbor has decided that he's Barry Manilow....full text |
| Virginmedia |
| He of Moldy Peaches fame, Green is one of those wonderfully idiosyncratic American singer/songwriters whose material resonates with echoes of Gram Parsons, Calexico and Leonard Cohen. On Gemstones there is no fat, only lean. His songs are short, punchy - not one is longer than 2 minutes 50 seconds long - lyrically dextrous and, at the end of the day, just plain damn catchy. Green's songs are tales of an alternative America, riven with dark and at times Burlesque humour....full text |
| Stylusmagazine |
| Adam Green used to be in The Moldy Peaches. The mainstream knowledge of The Moldy Peaches career arc is that they were the support for The Strokes on their We’ve Going To Get Old Real Quick tour, knocked out a couple of novelty indie tunes, and then split-up. The mainstream is the stupid. Firstly, here’s the biographical detail that all reviews should feature in the first 100 words: The Moldy Peaches haven’t split up. Granted, they’ve only played one gig together in the past two years, but that’s more than the majority of your favourite hip-hop cartels. Anyway, the solo material they’ve been putting out since those heady days of “Who’s Got The Crack?” are arm-breakingly strong. They also serve to point out who did what in the band. Kimya Dawson brought the eye-wateringly hurt lyrics, the emotion, the scars. Adam brought the penis jokes. But, then again, who doesn’t love a good penis joke every now and then? “Gemstones” has some cracking genital guffawery. “Choke On A Cock,” like Rammstein’s “Amerika,” works both as a general purpose “I, as a musician, have an intelligent and salient point to make criticising the foreign policy of George Walker Bush” song, and as a satire of the lyrical inanity pedalled by the Rock Against Bush axis. “I would dance on NBC and say “George Bush shook hands with me… and then I’d go and choke on a cock.” Later on in the song, Johnny Depp phones him up to give him props on being America’s best musician, and then the song turns into him being highly critical of some girl called “Rebecca.” Really, when Stylus runs its eagerly anticipated “I Love the 00s” feature in 2011, we’ll be using “Choke On A Cock” to sum up 2004 in 98 seconds. It’s not just puerility. Actually, none of it is puerility at all. The ignorant may pay a brief listen to the opening lines of “Carolina” (“Carolina, she’s from Texas, red bricks drop from her vagina”), shudder briefly at the thought of the female genitalia, and pass the whole thing off as a Beavis and Butthead-esque display of immaturity. However, there’s a reason why people still talk with massive fondness of Beavis and Butthead episodes from 10 years back, but very few will stop around the water cooler for a discussion of Question Time instalments from 1995. It’s because there’s a lot more behind the rude words to be discovered only by people with the perception and persistence to discover. So, “Carolina,” far from being a piece of scatological sniggering, is actually about coming to terms with a girlfriend’s abortion. Deeper than dirty water....full text |
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