Everything that Adam Green has done thus far — his time in the Moldy
Peaches, his two prior solo albums — has been golden. And then along
comes Gemstones, bearing a silver reflective cover. And, as we know,
silver never gets golder. So, the run is over. Green is no longer
synonymous with gold. But, let me go further than that: Gemstones isn't
even so-so silver, but, rather, shameful bronze. It's bronze with a
decidedly poo-brown hue, too. This all a wandering 88-word preamble to
get to the following statement: Gemstones is shit. It's awful. It
really, really is. All the lo-fidelity/lowbrow potty-mouthed charm of
Green's early anti-folk days is long gone. Of course, that'd all gone
on his glorious Friends of Mine record, too, but that disc still
captured Green's inquisitive sing-song spirit perfectly, matching his
rudimentary acoustic guitar (and the puerile prurience of his ad-hoc
lyricism) to sweeping string sections. What happened after that,
though, has sent Green to this musical grave. Putting together a band
to play the expansive arrangements of that disc, he recruited a crew of
dudes who're, basically, a bunch of slick session musicians. The
subsequent touring found Green just singing, the frontman out front of a
hot rock-combo. When time came to write this disc, then, it was Green
working in collaboration with his posse of paycheck-cashing
guns-for-hire; and, without Green's punk-rock strums as an anchor, these
fancy-fingered folk're free to overplay their way through
particularly busy songs filled with oversweet piano and Latiny
guitar-strums. What's most noxious, though, is the way that Green
sounds perfectly at home with them, his singing on "Crackhouse Blues," in
particular, being just as self-conscious and soulless as the musos he's
playing with. And, well, perhaps, on top of this, there is the fact
that, given he's no longer a teenager, Green's trademark lyrics are like
an old joke grown tired. More than that, they seem far less forgivable;
this is no longer the naughty comedy of a kid making music with his
babysitter, but the sleazy routines of a stand-up comedian fixated on
tawdry toilet humor.
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