Adam Green Sixes and Sevens by: Thomas Mendelovitis Thu:17-Apr-08 Label: Rough Trade Year: 2008 WB rating 83 out of 100

Adam Green is an ideas man, and they come thick and fast on studio album number five, Sixes and Sevens. Eschewing the excessively debauched tone of previous albums (which was perhaps borne out of a false need to shock), Green has calmed down a tad and come up trumps with 20 of his more concise, intelligent and bizarre takes on the joys of living.

As one half of the former Moldy Peaches (currently in favour after his partner Kimya Dawson provided the lion’s share of music for the film Juno), Sixes and Sevens should further cement the reputation of their peculiar brand of folk music. Green’s is a thoroughly distinct voice; though in timbre akin to brothers in baritone Jens Lekman and the Silver Jews’ David Berman, his tone is more reminiscent of their predecessors Reed, Richman (namechecked on ‘Morning After Midnight’), Malkmus and Morrisey. Like these artists, Green drops one-liners and skewed observations of contemporary life at a breakneck speed. His genius, however, is the expansion of this approach to an almost Dylan-meets-Beefheart stream-of-consciousness effect which, combined with classic pop arrangements, makes for consistently entertaining and rewarding listening.

Sixes and Sevens is an album of stories, though that is not to say we know, or are meant to know, what the stories are about. ‘Broadcast Beach’ talks of a place “where the cigarettes are nice and cheap” and of “the age before the rhinestone bands, there was a strangulation on these cold hands”. At the same time, Green seems to be tackling ‘issues’, but again his lyrical palette of oblique symbolism, obscure references, schizophrenic associations and idiosyncratic imagery is rendered through such a kaleidoscope that we are at a delicious loss as to what to make of it all.

‘Be My Man’ could be about the pressures of celebrity: “be my man, oh Tom and Jerry won’t you be my man, I wanna give that Michael Moore a dollar, oh Tom and Jerry won’t you be my man”. Could he be talking about family stresses on ‘Exp. 1’, when he says, deadpan: “I wanna learn sign language, then I could destroy my phone, teach it to my family, or my two families”? While such zingers as “I used to hang out with rich kids, but they only talked about me” (‘Rich Kids’) may not match such Gemstones as ‘Emily’s’ “some of the fellas like to think I’m Greek/I wanna love you maybe three days a week”, Green is still in fine lyrical form. Overall, his strength is to somehow constructs something of a narrative and thus to keep our attention, even in a song seemingly lacking coherence.

If the Moldy Peaches were ‘anti-folk’ (i.e. folk, but not at all), then Green perhaps could be ‘anti-pop’. While Dawson has gone down the unadorned acoustic guitar and vocal path, Green has done the opposite: revelling in upbeat pop in the mould of Bacharach, Elton John and the Brill Building hitmakers. First single ‘Morning After Midnight’ is all bristling soul horns and backing vocals. Following track ‘Twee Twee Dee’ is all funky guitar licks and faux-‘Do ya think I’m sexy’ disco strings.

Never tiresome, there are also more oddball pop refractions such as the El Condor Pasa Andean panpipes meets Mongol Jew’s harp of ‘You Get So Lucky’. The thing that converts, however, is that Green and his cohort of musicians, producers and engineers palpably truly, madly, deeply love the traditions they are mining and, as with Lekman, this enthusiasm translates to the listener as pure excitement.

The production philosophy behind Sixes and Sevens is primarily what makes the album such an exuberantly fun experience. Placed high in the mix for maximum lyrical potency, Green’s voice is unavoidable, but its texture is creamy and never grating. Such a recording technique may make the songs merely seem like vessels for his lyrics, but the correlation between his lyrics, vocals and arrangements is so perfect that one never feels cheated. Also winning is the pacing of the songs, from slow to fast, loud to soft, and the fact that across the large number of tracks the songs are mostly short (only two are over three minutes), sticky and successful in transmitting their ideas immediately. In this way it recalls a record such as Guided By Voices’ masterpiece Bee Thousand: big on concepts, short on attention span but all the while bursting with an irrepressible energy. To end with the big-name comparison, Green is something of a modern day Tom Waits. Skirting genres with a deft and inimitable touch, he perfectly utilises the cultural resonance behind each chosen musical model.

While pop’s formula for excellence (restraint and exuberance) is executed here to a T, making the album consistently and continually listenable, Sixes and Sevens is great for the simple fact that Adam Green is great. And like other greats, he is a conduit for things, notions and ideas greater than any one man could possibly fathom. At least, that is how Bob Dylan described the feeling he had when writing songs like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Thus, it doesn’t matter what “blankets filled with iodine” (‘Tropical Island’) means, what’s important is the feeling it gives us. His lyrics may not be as accessible as some of Dylan’s, but he is of a different time. As a channel between the collective unconscious and my own, he is unsurpassed by any contemporary lyricist.