Various Artists
Moping in Style: A Tribute to Adam Green
CAPITANE/ORG MUSIC
Born into the altogether-too-short-lived era of anti-folk with The Moldy Peaches and carrying on with a richly slack-happy solo career divided into lo-fried country rock, opulently arranged psychedelia, and Spectorian pop with surprising emotionality at its heart, often-bizarre but certainly still poignant songwriter Adam Green has been around the block several times over since the late 1990s. Which means he’s about due for a tribute album, since everyone else popular in that decade seems to have received one by now.
That old-school fellow freak folkies such as Devendra Banhart, Ben Kweller, and Jeffrey Lewis show up on Moping in Style is no surprise; that a warbling Banhart turns “Pay the Toll” into something elegant, gossamer, and soulful is, as he pulls mussels from the shell of Green’s spindly melodies. So, too, does Kweller turn his cover of “Her Father and Her” into something passionate and piano-heavy, more worthy of Father John Misty than Green. Cue Father John bringing his usual showiness in a close-to-Green take on “Musical Ladders.”
Meanwhile Regina Spektor and Jack Dishel make “We’re Not Supposed to Be Lovers” into an intimate, bell-shaped mini-epic, and TV on the Radio’s second-string vocalist Kyp Malone deconstructs Green’s “Drugs” into something Ken Nordine once called “word jazz”—only darker—then proceeds to tear away any strain of Green’s ditzy cheer for a sound more diabolical and airless than anything his band ever rendered. Though the album is all for Green, and the artists are certainly cooperative in that goal, you can’t help leaving Moping in Style wishing that a new album from Malone’s band that’s as menacing as this effort comes quickly.
