Song, by Toad

Not that I want to seem like an ungrateful bastard, but I doubt this review will make me seem anything but.  As much as there were elements of Adam Green’s stuff that I liked on previous records, it was all just so unbearably arch and ‘witty’ that I found that my annoyance at what came across as his smugness pretty much throttled my capacity to listen to his music with any real enjoyment.  Just tone it down a bit, I would think to myself.

Well now, lyrically anyway, he kind of has, and I’m still not happy.  Musically, this is big stuff from Green – his trademark acoustic guitar strum making way for a bigger, more pantomime sound.  He’s always had a penchant for swooping, slightly surreal forays into oddly theatrical backing, and here that kind of calypso soul-with-swing comes out to play much more often.  It actually sounds a lot like Big Production to me, and even the album cover looks a bit smarter and sharper than usual, all of which serves to do what I had been looking forward to for a while, tone down the Adam Greenyness of it all.

Unfortunately, this actually robs the music of something crucial.  In toning down the Adam Greenyness they seem to have, erm, lost a little bit of the Adam Greenyness, if you know what I mean.  Basically, in stopping the vocals and hence the dubious lyrics from dominating, they seem to have robbed the music of something of its essential character, and I find myself looking back to his previous recordings, which I found deeply irritating at times, with something like nostalgia.

Some people are just never fucking happy.

Adam Green – Tropical Island
Adam Green – Broadcast Beach

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