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Taking time out from his regular digs (the
putting-the-idiot-in-idiot-savant scatalogical New York dork-rock
duo-cum-sextet the Moldy Peaches), modern-day minstrel and
potty-mouthed postmodernist poet Adam Green explores the softer side
of his homey, homespun, home-recorded, homoerotic songsmithing.
Keeping songs to a set of guitar progressions that rarely rise above
basic blues forms, this is Green trying to keep things simple,
concentrating on wedding his absurdist, surrealist, prurient lyrics
to something resembling traditional songwriter-like odes. There are
plenty of times on this self-titled set when he wanders way off this
line — best seen in the bizarro "electronic sounds" laid with
fuck-up intent through "Apples, I'm Home" and "Computer Show," but
not to forget the squalling guitar solo on "Dance With Me." But the
album delivers its most essential moments when it's at its most
concise. Kept to the kind of simple blues that friend/counterpart
Jeffrey Lewis often writes, cuts like "Mozzarella Swastikas," "Her
Father and Her" and "Bartholomew" let their simple finger-picked
rhythms provide a bed for Green's childlike deconstruction of
language, ranging from the infantile to the ironic to the comic to
the utterly transcendental. "Mozzarella Swastikas" manages to stumble
through all of those sentiments with its escalating conclusion: "Papa
was smart/ But mama said I wasn't/ Now I got a million dollars/ But
who doesn't/ Gonna go to the graveyard/ To get some begging done/
Gonna dig up Megan/ And cut out my son."
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