Adam Green, the Moldy Peach who's made a name for himself on the fringes of the singer/songwriter community with his playful, sometimes crude, sometimes sweet, lyrics, returns to Rough Trade for his fifth solo release, Sixes & Sevens. With 20 tracks, the album gives more than enough glimpses at Green's wide-ranging stylings and influences ('50s pop, country, folk, blues-rock, pop, even hip-hop), but it is this very range that is also detrimental. Green can certainly write a decent pop song, but his tendency to jump from one musical theme to another is more distracting and bothersome than anything else. Instead of showing off his ability, Sixes & Sevens is a disjointed conglomeration of different ramblings that can't quite coalesce around any sort of idea. This is only accentuated by the fact that Green's songs themselves generally don't say much of anything, more focused on complex internal rhyme than meaning. The tracks, albeit short (only a couple are over three minutes) seem to drag on indefinitely, and though the album clocks in at just under 50 minutes, it feels as if much more time has passed when the final chords of "Rich Kids," an all-in-all decent song, are played. Green has so many voices, it's hard to know which one is his own. Is it the Tom Jones-esque one on the Hanson Brothers-helped "Twee Twee Dee"? The Stephen Malkmus on "Be My Man"? The Paul Simon on "You Get So Lucky"? Perhaps it's in the middle, where the singer launches into a medley that recalls his folkier days and manages to come across as both sentimental and quirky (take the touchingly open "Homelife," for example)? Sixes & Sevens is too much, too disparate, too nonsensical, to bring together its parts, so even though strong individual moments exist -- "Getting Led," the aforementioned "Homelife" -- as a whole it never quite sounds completed.
© Marisa Brown /TiVo