Adam Green - 'Friends Of Mine' (Rough Trade)
4/5
By: Joshua K
Repeat after me: 'difficult second album'. Outside of an avalanche of drugs, probably the most significant hurdle a rising performer can face. You've had your whole life to write that first record, and now mere months to come up with the second while touring, shaking hands with VIPs, and being feted as this month's flavor.
Leave it to Adam Green, shorn of the costumes that mark his tenure in The Moldy Peaches - but not the wryness - to sneak right up on this cliché and spit in its eye with his second solo album in under a year.
In fact, with this LP, Green has established himself as one of music's top free-form word poets. He consistently strings together phrases that at first seem incoherent or unrelated but slowly paint a picture rich in imagery and (often multiple) meaning, creating songs that are equally timeless and obliquely commenting on our world.
Case in point: closing track 'Bungee', a tale of incest and suicide that finds Adam 'tripp[ing] down the stairs in [his] basketball shoes,' after learning of the death of a friend. Multiple listens reveal the song's many layers, but somehow it never drags you down to the level of grim depression that clumsier musical hands would inspire.
Of course, all is not maudlin seriousness in the world of the man who co-wrote 'Who's Got The Crack?'. Over the fifteen tracks we also get references to sex with legless and faceless women ('No Legs') and a savagely funny evisceration of Britney Spears clone Jessica Simpson ('Jessica'), among other ditties.
Adding a polished and richly-instrumented sheen to the shambolic ramblings of Green's 2002 effort, 'Garfield', 'Friends of Mine' is perhaps the best, most consistent recorded effort yet to emerge from the anti-folk underground: accomplished; inspired; playful yet mature; witty but (oft) meaningful.
Artists in this article: Adam Green
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