Minor Love isn’t a
terribly complicated album. No song lasts more than three minutes, no song
attempts a more than traditional rock instrument set up with the occasional
wind instrument or horn section, and no song is devoid of Adam Green’s low,
apathetic, not-quite-a-drawl-but-getting-close-to-it vocals. Yet all the same,
there’s something endearing and real about the album that eludes even the
best-chosen words.
Green, of Moldy Peaches’ (but mostly Juno) fame, has that
kind of voice that hasn’t made popular comeback for many years. It’s like the
lovechild of a bizarre midnight tryst between Johnny Cash and Lou Reed, and the
same can be said for the album.
Minor Love doesn’t
stay on the same note entirely, but it doesn’t try for too much. Green waxes a
little too poetic for his leather jacket persona depicted on the cover, with
lyrics like “cigarette eyes” and “he wanted me to kill him but I took his life
instead” that sound lifted from a Flight of the Conchords song when they pretend to be serious. But he makes
up for it with songs like “Oh Shucks” and “Lock Out,” which let the rock be in
the focus and the lyrics a simple storyteller.
That’s not to say that poetry is bad, far from it. There’s a
silver lining of musical poetry throughout Minor Love. Songs like “Bathing
Birds,” “Boss Inside,” and “Don’t Call Me Uncle” play through with an intense
sincerity that almost hurts. These songs carry along a beautiful feeling that’s
not harsh enough to be rock but not mellow enough to be folksy.
However, the album’s not exactly lovely. Green has a
persistent love for the word “flatulent,” and is willing to go to length to
include it in the most inopportune of times. He disrupts the anecdotal and
acoustically flowing “Castles and Tassels” by rhyming the title of the song
with “flatulent assholes” and then professing his love for said assholes. Green
also exhibits his bizarre immaturity hidden in maturity in the song “Bathing
Birds,” when he stops the peaceful congruence of the song to tell us all to
“mind your pubis/find more shmucks to advertise.”
These moments interrupt the listening experience for a few
moments. The listener will pause the track to ask, “Did he just say ‘assholes’?”
and will then rewind to think to themselves, Yes, he really did say ‘assholes,’
but now I’m wondering why he did that, and why he would love them, especially
if they’re farting. But that’s really the
only large thing that detracts from Minor Love.
Beneath the shmucks and assholes and pubes and purposely
under-produced guitar squeals lies an album with a heart of gold that has
enough confidence and experience to sooth the ears of even the hardest hearted
of cynics at points. Green puts on a lone wolf persona that’s hit or miss, but
when it hits it hits.
Minor Love feels poetic
despite the short life span of the songs. Some kind of entity that surrounds Minor
Love makes a two-minute song ramble like
Jack Elliot. It could be the lyrics themselves, or the articulate guitar
playing, or maybe it’s just Green’s Voice. Whatever that force is, it’s driving
the entire album, and doing it with a slick ambition that doesn’t play to the
cool side nor to the folk one, regardless the quality of the song.
It’s impressive that a singer-songwriter as childish in
imagination as Adam Green has managed to write such a mature album. The album’s
imperfect, but perhaps that’s what perfect means to Green.
