I’m not really down with the dissclub surrounding the Adam Green album, which I keep coming back to and am only slowly realizing why. Dom Passantino, whose review on Stylus of the album got me into it, is a character I take pretty seriously (when he chooses to be serious). Granted, not that many people care about the album to begin with, but when reviews have come up, they’re usually colored by words like “juvenile,” “smart-assed,” etc., which seems both reductive and innacurate (shocka). Does anyone else besides me see him as some tangential heir to the sorely empty throne of numbered-album-era Scott Walker, at least sometimes?

I can’t escape “Carolina,” which, after several listens, started to just give me goosebumps every time. The “Carolina”/”vagina” rhyme, fine, pick at it, but don’t make the idiodic mistake of reading the “red bricks” as anything else than an aborted fetus. The whole thing is incredibly grisly, Green singing the chorus from the perspective of the canned babe: “give us back our lives, leave him, Carolina.”

What you’ve got in the end is an ambiguous and upsetting look at the youthful attitude towards post-pill free sex; Green didn’t have to go and say shit like “goodnight sweetheart flying high on birth control, she knows rejection’s in her bones.” (Incidentally, the Scott Walker I’m talking about is, say, the harrowing child-sex-abuse narrative of “Next” from Scott 2.) The twirling cocktail shlock soundtrack to Green’s tale only supports the sickening tone of the song, rather than demean it. My current addiction.