With the Doors-like ‘White Women’ opening with the line, “You know I want to bone you” followed by “Fuck fuck me baby” it’s obvious that former Moldy Peach Adam Green hasn’t quite abandoned his penchant for puerile adolescent humour.
Four albums in, Green still hangs on to juvenile obsessions, notably sex, porn, crack and any other drug which comes to mind.
Yet, if lyrically, sleaze is still the subject of choice for the prolific New Yorker, then on Jacket Full Of Danger he’s married this with the Las Vegas kitsch first hinted at on 2004’s Friends Of Mine.
The lead-off single ‘Nat King Cole’ captures Vegas-era Elvis, while the ‘50s stylings of ‘Hollywood Bowl’ see him explore an ‘all-American’ sound. One reviewer once described Green as “Neil Sedaka for The Strokes generation”. Throughout Jacket Full Of Danger, that title rings true. Green’s croon, switching from Nick Cave (‘Novotel’) to Scott Walker (‘Jolly Good’), mirrors the feel of a superannuated singer taking to the Vegas stage.
Clocking in at under half an hour, Green never tries to stretch the joke and never does the record grate, despite its obvious novelty factor. At its best it shifts from the dramatic to the melancholic, notably on ‘Watching Old Movies’ and ‘C-Birds’. It’s here where Green displays some maturity. Were he to more often bridge such maturity with his noted innovation, we may have been left with a finer record.