Shit fuck piss! I thought I could toss Adam Green, erstwhile of early '00s anti-folkers Moldy Peaches, following the stiff shock-value yucks and self-satisfied cabaret smirks of his 2005 full-length Gemstones. But on his latest solo album, Jacket Full of Danger, the New York eccentric at last fully immerses himself in vulgarity-- in the scummy bilge water of language and culture. Like the hapless beer-run guy trapped in "express" checkout behind some 69-items-or-more Daddy's girl, I can't help but enjoy perusing the headlines, even if I wouldn't quite take the thing home.
See, Green digs trash. Crissakes he once covered "Kokomo". So this time douchebag goes all the way with the string section his last album dropped. He frolics in a rancid NashVegas compost heap of rhinestone cowboys and dope-addled wash-outs; indeed, after a Rupert Holmes drum fill, opener "Pay the Toll" escapes into magical Glen Campbell bombast. "How many drugs does it take to find something to do?" Green croons, a recurring career theme echoed to assier effect in the disappointingly adolescent "Drugs". "Party Line" serenades a prostitute amid similarly glitzy scenery. Whiskey-period Jim Morrison track "White Women" turns Green's former dumbfuck tricks, but it also reprises a tiki-bar backing chant from the truly bizarre "C Bird". Hey, trash sells.
Occasionally, Green chases the skirt of his fucked-up muse someplace actually revelatory. "Fellas in umbrellas in the middle of the night/ What you gonna do when the Mennonites bite?" he sings on "Novotel", a dizzy minute-and-a-half organ jaunt that calls out Isaac Asimov's Pete Doherty pastime (hint rhymes with "rack"). Acoustic closer "Hairy Women" hypocritically bemoans the fate of ladies with characteristics widely deemed unattractive: "I have praise for every fantasy that braves a hairy nipple." On first single "Nat King Cole", Green's brassy vibrato neatly evokes fat aloha Elvis, spewing absurdities before lurching into his name-dropping chorus. John Leguizamo gets a mention, too. Celebrity call-outs are no surprise from the guy who paid ironic homage to mammary icon Jessica Simpson, but here they're finally funny. "Bob Dylan is a vegetable's wife," Green sings with unlikely aptness, like found poetry from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Weekly World News.
The aggressively banal orchestral arrangements and cornball baritone make Jacket Full of Danger something like a rakish Scott Walker for the post-Beck era. Lest you doubt Green's cred, there's also a not-that-innocent Beat Happening cover. Green's lowest notes sometimes recall buddy Julian Casablancas' recent because-I-can barrel-scrapes. What the album's other, lesser songs point out: Green, that stoned motherfucker, possesses a unique patchwork vision of warped mass nostalgia. But he only intermittently gets it all in focus. Oh, the country he's huge in, again? They coined the word "kitsch".
