Album Review: Engine of Paradise by Adam Green

Discounting the soundtrack to his 2016 Aladdin film and a 2013 LP of duets with singer Binki Shapiro, Engine of Paradise arrives as Adam Green's first proper solo release since the relatively low-key Minor Love back in 2010. While the former Moldy Peach has since stretched out as an experimental filmmaker, visual artist, and poet in the ensuing years, his musical mode remains relatively unchanged since he reinvented himself in the early years of the millennium. His quick transition from jokey, lo-fi, anti-folk bard to slightly less jokey, retro-pop crooner came about in 2003, lodging him rather firmly in a stylistic comfort zone which he has populated from album to album with the distinctive lyrical oddities, offbeat humor, and an unkempt baritone that constitute his bailiwick.

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The former Moldy Peach takes it easy with a beatific collection of woozy folk and '70s-inspired New York pop featuring none other than Florence Welch In 2016, Adam Green made what he's claimed is the first feature movie to be shot entirely on an iPhone. It was his reimagining of Aladdin and, starring Macaulay Culkin and Father John Misty, used 500 papier mache props with the action staged against 40 different cardboard sets. It's a project that encapsulates much of Green's output: unabashedly hip, likeably warm and analogue and, above all, seemingly unmoored from anything as boring as common sense.

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