Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 10/04/06
Label: Rough Trade

We fell in love by accident, me and Adam Green. A heavenly coincidence, you might call it. He was the thrift store crooner with the cool hair and the spotless pedigree (former singer with the Moldy Peaches, mates with The Strokes and The Libertines, from New York), and your Yahoo! Music operative was powerless to resist, frankly. His signature tune, "Friends Of Mine", didn't just ooze charm, it inhabited it, giving a knowing smirk and flashing a raised eyebrow as it talked its way past our defences. It was a first date, but, hell, sometimes these things happen.

"Jacket Full Of Danger" is, alas, where the romance sours. It is the sound of a man high on his own charm, the sound of someone who's so confident he's snared your attention for good that he spends half of the night taking the piss out of you with his friends and telling loud, embarrassing jokes that everyone seems to laugh at but you. It is the sound of cool curdling. Oh ho ho, how those just-so hipsters are going to snort into their cocktails at the merry wheezes perpetrated on this record, but for this listener at least the joke just isn't funny anymore.

That's the crux, of course. "Friends Of Mine" wasn't funny - it was charming. "Jacket Full Of Danger" thinks it's funny but isn't - it's often pathetic. Let's take the worst example first: "White Women" is an excruciatingly sordid Doors pastiche that starts with Green howling "You know I wanna bone you" and proceeds onto a begged refrain of "f*ck f*ck me baby". Hilarious - if you're an idiot. And that's without even taking the title into consideration. In relationship terms, it's the equivalent of your partner insulting your family and then throwing up over themselves at an emotional event. Like, say, your gran's funeral.

Happily, the rest is just bitingly insincere rather than unforgivably vulgar. "Hollywood Bowl" answers the long-pondered question: "What would Neil Diamond sound like if he played some '50s rock'n'roll for laughs?" Those of a trucker-cap wearing persuasion may consider this hyper-kitsch or ultra-ironic, but really it's just a bit tawdry. "Hey Dude" showboats its way through another dodgy Jim Morrison impression, while the likes of "Jolly Good" and "Vultures" are so self-consciously clever-clever that you're drained of any sympathy.

The tragic thing, inevitably, is that when Adam drops the ego, there's that charm and talent we initially fell for. "Cast A Shadow" is sweet and romantic, a pleasingly soppy paean to the memory of a past lover. "Party Line" has a smoother, Jacques Brel jams with Belle & Sebastian (Brel & Sebastian, anyone?) feel, and "Nat King Cole" could be Lou Reed knocking out "Jumpin' Jack Flash" in a rare moment of good humour. But with another dumb cool jerk tune never far away, you're left asking one very pertinent question.

Why do we need this buffoon when we've got Richard Hawley?

    by Ian Watson