Adam Green & Ninki Shapiro

You might remember Adam Green in early anti-folk hero mode, as one half of The Moldy Peaches. His solo efforts over the past decade, meanwhile, have found him channeling all his heroes, penning ‘60s and ‘70s odes to love with a post-millenial quip or two to distinguish them from the real thing.
Here he teams up with Binki Shapiro, a singer and multi-instrumentalist he met through one of her old flames, Fab Moretti of The Strokes: you might remember her striking Annette Kleinbard vocals in Moretti’s Little Joy project.
This new duo’s first album together has already had critics dipping back into their record collections to reappraise their Nancy & Lee LPs and, while it is true that the pair like to indulge in a lot of ‘60s regression, they’re so good that it feels almost brand new.
Green’s sad sack, crumpled baritone dovetails wonderfully with Shapiro’s Dusty Springfield-esque tones, introduced via ‘Here I Am’, an acoustic kiss with an ascending chorus that literally waltzes into view. The following brace are strong displays of Green’s craft, unfairly overlooked for years due to his perceived lack of ambition and ironic, patience-testing persona.
The middle sags noticeably. The Phil Spector ‘boom, ba-boom tish’ drum signature so adored by indies since The Mary Chain is mined for all – or, rather, more than – its worth; ‘If You Want Me To’ is bland; and ‘Pleasantries’ employs a cutesy bickering tactic that is sub-She & Him.
The final third, however, is a joy. Heralded by ‘What’s The Reward’, the composition closest to classic Hazlewood, we are inveigled into darker, less poppy territory. It suits them. The aforementioned track employs stark time changes, epic western motifs, Tarantino-esque surf rock guitars and impressively knowing lyrics to win us over. Shapiro sings of “coining ideas that have already been used, you only know how to romanticise old news” – beautiful self-deprecation. ‘Don’t Ask For More’, equipped with a hypnotic French bass-line and cooing vocal, introduces unexpected steel drums to evoke a sad sigh in a Caribbean locale. The dark side of the sun.
The end is as bleak as a song entitled ‘The Nighttime Stopped Bleeding’ can be. It sounds like a death march, our duo becoming more distant as the song progresses, before the whole thing draws to a close with the kind of brevity that deserves applause. The approach turns this record from a nice distraction that could have collapsed at the appropriately-titled ‘Pleasantries’ into something altogether more intriguing. A worthwhile endeavour.