Adam Green: Minor Love

By the time the songs of Adam Green’s filthy-minded, sweet-natured band Moldy Peaches appeared in Juno, he had long since struck out on his own, recording several albums that beefed up his lo-fi sound with gospel choirs, pan flutes, and swooning strings. Minor Love takes a step back toward Green’s folky roots, ventilating the instrumentation and smearing the vocals with a thick layer of reverb. Like Liam Lynch, Green has a knack for sizing up a genre and spitting out a tongue-in-cheek ditto that’s as entertaining as it is naggingly inconsequential, but Minor Love’s songs feel a little heftier than usual—or maybe he just finally struck the right balance of tenderness and tastelessness. “Boss Inside” recalls Songs Of Love And Hate-era Leonard Cohen, down to the creeping psychological dread and smooth baritone, while “Castles And Tassels” accomplishes the admirable feat of rhyming “tassels” with “assholes” before segueing into a cheerfully raunchy fairy tale with the very un-fairy-tale moral of “You’ve got to have money.” Producer Noah Georgeson (who’s worked with Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart) helps ease Green’s transition into adulthood, casting the chugging Velvet Underground riffs on “What Makes Him Act So Bad” in liquid ’60s production, and giving Minor Love enough roominess to feel appealingly minimal instead of disappointingly simple.