When Adam Green’s third LP, Gemstones, came out in early 2005, one critic praised the NY-based singer-songwriter’s “astute lyrical swankiness”. Another thought his songs “plop out like forced turds”. The rest of the reviews lay somewhere in between. With Rough Trade now releasing its 20th anniversary reissue, we can all revisit the album to see who was right.
Well, it turns out everybody was. Gemstones remains a strange contradiction, a record where you swoon over Green’s baritone one moment, only to wrinkle your nose over a bawdy punchline the next. He leans into cabaret, bringing along the influences of Scott Walker and Jacques Brel, to produce what he has called “powerful magic spells”, not undeservedly. Then, without warning, he’ll rhyme ‘Carolina’ with ‘vagina’. And he won’t stop there, describing the titular character in ‘Carolina’ in quite some detail: she’s from Texas, with lips that taste like sunk ships, “But her breasts taste just like breakfast”. Can you guess where her hand is resting? Yep, on the cock sock. It’s the stuff of pubescent boys’ dreams.
Across the record – 15 tracks in a little under 32 minutes – Green adopts several roles, with the moody balladeer and the performer at some bizarre vaudeville show the two most prominent. But whoever he portrays, and sometimes it’s more than one character within the same song, he never lets you feel comfortable for too long. The tone keeps shifting abruptly, nowhere more so than on the Wurlitzer-driven opener and title track, where he keeps twirling around with such speed that you’re starting to feel dizzy. It’s all a bit messy and jittery, a lot like the man himself, “a wide-eyed 23-year-old coming to terms with my newfound German pop-stardom”, at the time. (Green achieved huge success in Germany in the early 2000s.)
Gemstones is a world apart from the now iconic 2001 debut of The Moldy Peaches, Green and Kimya Dawson’s quirky anti-folk duo that made them both famous. Though the swearing and occasionally crass humour are intact, Green shows more variety on this solo effort, the follow-up to 2003’s violin-heavy Friends of Mine. ‘Emily’ is the kind of irresistible rock ‘n’ roll froth that fills dancefloors, the tinge of country in the surprisingly pensive ‘Losing on a Tuesday’ brings Lee Hazlewood to mind, and then there’s ‘Choke on a Cock’, an absurd, irreverent ditty about meeting George W. Bush and, well, choking on a cock.
This may be a bit much for some, but the way Green keeps throwing you for a loop gives the album a certain flair. Charm, even. It’s obscured by his awkward, restless energy, sure, but still unmistakable. He combines being edgy with his knack for simple, sweet melodies, and what comes out is often unexpectedly affecting. For all the theatrics and surreal poetry, he strikes you as someone you’d quite like to hang out with. A confused twenty-something, lost and longing, who happens to have felt like creating a throwback cabaret pop album that was equally sincere and vulgar. Is it an acquired taste? Yes, but weird beat bland 20 years ago, and it still does today.
Gemstones (20th Anniversary Reissue) is out now on Rough Trade. For more information on Adam Green, visit his Instagram.
