April 21-27, 2005

musicpicks

Adam Green

Rock/pop

Either he's growing up or becoming less of an asshole. Maybe he feels challenged after seeing his Moldy Peaches cohort Kimya Dawson garner critical acclaim with the sensitive and sincere Hidden Vagenda last year. Bereft of his typical callousness and songs about crippled lovers, Adam Green's latest outing, Gemstones (Rough Trade), is astonishingly clean and innocuous, dropping only one sarcastic anti-Semitic quip (Green is Jewish, so there's his loophole). The only questionable cut, "Emily," has him rhapsodizing about an underage girl ("I got the cookies that your momma sent / I got permission from the government"), but he seems interested in little more than dancing with her. On the one hand, the album's mostly PG-13 lyric sheet kinda makes us miss Green the lecher. On the other, his songwriting and singing has improved so much, it's delightful to watch him work his Jonathan Richman aspirations, even if he's hardly Jonathan Richman. Green's still got his infamously puerile predilection toward nasty sexual references, as in the freewheeling "Choke on a Cock," which, by the way, is what he said to shout down a heckler at the TLA two years ago.

Wed., April 27, 9 p.m., $10, with Kurt Vile, The Five Spot, 5 S. Bank St., 215-574-0070, www.thefivespot.com.

—John Vettese