Minor Love

With echoes of Lou Reed in many of the tracks, including ‘What Makes Him Act So Bad’ and ‘Cigarette Burns Forever’, and faint hints of Green’s previous work with the Peaches in others - ‘Oh Shucks’ - ‘Minor Love’ sees Green marry his roots with the new directions he’s taking, and comparison to the tape recorder fodder of old isn’t so hard make anymore.

On “Minor Love,’’ Green’s sixth solo record, he proves adept as ever traversing through the American popular songbook and filtering his findings through a hazy stoner’s smog of absurdity.

Minor Love proves that Adam Green can be thoughtful and he can be nice. What’s more, he wears it well.

Gentle, droll and - bar the disappointingly immature Oh Shucks - mercifully free of knob gags, Minor Love is charming. [Feb 2010, p. 108]

Minor Love is the rare record that has something for everyone, your dad, your discontent pop-isolationist, that mix you’ve been meaning to make, and a long drive across desert highway – and ends up being an impressive testament to Adam Green’s lasting relevance.

Green revels in a stripped-down, bittersweet world where noting last forever, with both his baritone and lyrics adding freshness to his fatalist outlook. [Winter 2010, p.99]

Like Liam Lynch, Green has a knack for sizing up a genre and spitting out a tongue-in-cheek ditto that’s as entertaining as it is naggingly inconsequential, but Minor Love’s songs feel a little heftier than usual—or maybe he just finally struck the right balance of tenderness and tastelessness.

The album, in general, is much more relaxed than anything Reed created (post-Nico, that is), and while the whole thing has a vaguely hazed-out feel, the effect created is more stoner chill than frenetic heroin-induced madness

Adam Green’s flowering from puerile anti-folk twonk with The Moldy Peaches to suave lounge-country crooner is laudable.

The best tracks here still feature his distinct blend of surrealist poetry, but the music does not even meet it halfway.

Musically it's toytown folk, like Jonathan Richman with out the complicated buts, but Green's narrative lyrics grow increasingly weird and witty, recalling early '70s Lou Reed. [Feb 2010, p.86]

Minor Love still packs some Jonathan Richman–esque quirk, as Green croons in a Lou Reed deadpan about goblins, flatulence, and other concerns over solidly constructed lo-fi tunes.

Though there's a nice sense of humor throughout, there's just not enough meat on the bone to inspire any sort of real investment in the majority of these songs.

His style, somewhere between Leonard Cohen and The Velvet Underground, offers little in terms of originality, and often the sappy and stoically emotional quality of the lyrics comes off as snarky.