By rights there should have been a line drawn under this whole episode a long time ago. It’d be like ‘do you remember that time way back when so and so said that thing and we were up all night laughing!?’, and you’d be like ‘Christ yeah, good times, how the years fly, yadda yadda, we should do it all again sometime’, and you’d both agree. Only you wouldn’t do it again, because those days are in the past and deep down inside you both know that you’d be forcing a wooden smile at best these days. But that would remain unsaid out of respect to your memories. You get the feeling nothing much that passes through Adam Green’s head remains unsaid. With production line efficiency every fragment will have been pinned down, spun around, painted up in double-entendre, washed down with filthy innuendo, paired up with a previous effort and tacked onto a major chord.
The revelation with his first solo album was that it was actually alright. And it was alright without Kimya stood next to him in a bunny costume singing fairly cute songs about crack and downloading porn. Alright, so the subject matter had hardly graduated and got a job with prospects, but they weren’t the self-same songs that made the Moldy Peaches seem simultaneously adorable and of heroically short shelf life. So they shouldn’t have worked, their freshness and their quirks were their key. But by and large they did, which was down to his wit, which if nothing else was consistent. Without the novelty it didn’t really seem any less novelty, but it did seem rather more long-life. But by now it must be the time to appraise by how much.
It’s credit to his consistency that much here is much the same, yet despite that there is an increasingly nagging thought that this is all just a bit pointless really. These are ditties about and in aid of nothing, as far as we can discern, apart from setting up opportunities-a-plenty to toss round witty wordplay and mentions of crack-houses and sexual promiscuity with a juvenile frequency. Here’s a quiz – can you guess which part of the female anatomy he rhymes “Carolina” with, in the song ‘Carolina’? He has moved on from the basic anti-folk model, even if he clucthes to its principals. ‘Crackhouse Blues’ is Elton John in piano-bruising party-boy mode, ‘Country Road’ is ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’ covered by 90s student novelty hit Mike Flowers Pops and ‘Teddy Boy’ is Buddy Holly. Or Cliff Richard. Of course that kind of genre exploring is as serious as a Saturday Night Live sketch. But you already know he’s no precious rock and is as disposable as they come. So enjoy this as far as you can, and then discard.