Adam Green’s latest project is a film reworking the tale of Aladdin, featuring his own strange cartoon set drawings, and Macaulay Cullkin. This should be weird, but to longtime fans, even people vaguely aware of Green, there’s little more you can do than shrug your shoulders and say “yeah, probably”.
The soundtrack to this movie is Green’s first musical output since 2013’s duet album with Binki Shapiro, who also plays the role of ‘Miner’ in the film. However, musically, the Aladdin soundtrack follows on musically more from Green’s last solo album, 2011’s Minor Love.
Although admittedly miles away from the sound of his first band, The Moldy Peaches, the songs on this soundtrack are still lo-fi featuring the close-recorded drums and sleazy electric guitars of Minor Love. It’s a far cry from his previous albums such as the Scott Walker singing Jacques Brel influenced Friends of Mine, or the German cabaret sound of Jacket Full of Danger & Sixes & Sevens. But some things still stick – such as Green’s ability to mix it up by including music from outside of mainstream Western culture – and having previously dabbled in Eastern European Polkas he experiments with the Mambo on this soundtrack.
What remains quintessentially Adam Green on this album, and a mainstay throughout his varied songwriting career, is still an incredible sense of melody and an easy-to-listen-to voice, singing sometimes very-hard-to-listen-to lyrics – be it in their opaqueness or their crudity. On opening track ‘Fix My Blues‘, he sings “Your breasts are like two wrists that I’ve handcuffed to my dick / In a subculture of love and refraction”.
There are seemingly more autobiographical moments on the soundtrack such as the song ‘Nature of The Clown’. Green has often previously written about seeing himself as an ‘Entertainer’ in Friends of Mine’s ‘We’re Not Supposed To Be Lovers‘, and a Peter Pan figure throughout his work, so perhaps this track, with it’s admission of previous misdemeanours, Green sees himself as Aladdin with all of his boyish enthusiasm.
Interspersed between the songs – that as ever with Green aren’t particularly narrative driven in any truly clear way – are some soundbites from the films that are reminiscent of the surreal one-liners that made up Green’s last movie, the iPhone shot The Wrong Ferrari. There are also, as in The Wrong Ferrari, many references throughout the album to an alternative video game world, Nintendo, a currency called ‘Space bucks’, and drugs.
It’s as ever a strange project, but that’s become the norm for those people aware of Adam Green. As an album it stands up to an enjoyable listen without seeing the film, with songs like the pretty ‘Never Lift A Finger‘ standing up alone. Having not yet seen the film maybe it will be able to add clarity to the songs on this soundtrack, although knowing Green it will probably make things more confusing, albeit in an enjoyable way if you’re willing to accept that you’ll never be able to quite figure him out.
