It’s funny. Well not quite, not like that, that’s the thing. We never found Adam Green’s anti-folk that laugh-out-loud, not even when he was with the Moldy Peaches. He was a sweet rascal, meticulous and creative, a wiseass with a guitar capable of levering a cracked smile from your cold, straight face if you’d give him 3 minutes, but his songs didn’t often feel consistent enough. But here’s the thing; all of a sudden, with the arrival of his fourth solo album ‘Jacket Full Of Danger’, we do find him funny, kind of. How about that. Still not roll-around funny, but we think that even by his own admission he’d not claim to be a stand-up, but funny nonetheless. Affirmative chuckle funny, the kind that urges the teller of a tale onwards towards its climax safe in the knowledge that the scene has not only been set, but approved and applauded too.
He’s turned into a rare example of the artist who actually matured with age, within the positive meaning of the word as opposed to the shedding of the exciting bits. Any limits that he may have had have seem to have been broken and swept aside. And why exactly can’t a cheeky indie kid with a cheap guitar act up like he’s on Broadway, and get away with it!? He was already the lounge Leonard Cohen to a point, yet now he is that to extremes, on ‘Hollywood Bowl’, ‘Hey Dude’ and the fabulous back-of-the-larynx ‘Nat King Cole’ especially. You can picture him leaping between spotlights, the perky, riotous orchestration and props on strings. It’s quite the show, combined with the main attraction, his words, which this time resist just going for the smutty cheap shot. Inexplicably he makes it all the way through ‘Cast A Shadow’ without rhyming the repeated word “direction“ with ‘erection’. That’s what they call progress.