After a decade with a smirk all but tattooed onto his face, Adam Green finally seems ready to be heartbroken. Minor Love is his most lo-fi, stripped-down record made since his 2003 solo debut Garfield and, fittingly, it may also be his most melancholic. Gone are his jaunty novelties and glossy production ”“ the last album’s trumpets and swooning strings replaced with cheap Casio keyboards ”“ and even the croon that threatened to turn him into the Scott Walker of the Upper West Side has been drastically toned down. What’s left is a man who sounds as endearingly awkward and vulnerable as the pose he’s pulling on the record’s front cover.Although a more consciously mature-sounding record ”“ as if to insist “I don’t need a gospel choir to prove I mean it anymore” ”“ Green has hardly let his serious side get the better of him, with his wisecracks, wisdom and non-sequiturs remaining thankfully in tact. The chorus of soulfully hushed opener ‘Breaking Locks’ insists “I’ve been too awful to ever be thoughtful”, while 'Give Them a Token' ”“ a vintage Green number if there ever was one ”“ sa(va)gely claims that “minor love can be shorn like a scarf”.However, as far as the songs themselves go, the record comes up slightly short; his lease on a shabby flophouse in Tin Pan Alley seems to still be valid but, shorn of their production flourishes and reduced to guitar/bass/drums, much of Minor Love sounds almost workmanlike if not, as on ‘Castles and Tassels’, downright annoying. There are, of course, exceptions ”“ the gorgeously slow-building ‘Bathing Birds’ or the curious approximation of Young Marble Giants’ interweaving instrumentation on ‘Lockout’ (ironically, the most elaborate track here). More often than not, as on the evocative ‘Boss Inside’ (“He wanted me to kill him, but I took his life instead”), it’s the moments when Green steps up to the microphone alone when things get interesting, and nowhere is this more evident than ‘Don’t Call Me Uncle’. One of the few times in his career where it doesn’t sound like at least one (if not both) of his eyebrows are arched, ‘Uncle’ floats along on a single deftly picked acoustic guitar, while Green’s double-tracked voice twists imagery and characters like a Bowery Beckett, before finally reaching a climactically tearjerking admission to his one-time sweetheart: “You’re my daughter, in a sense, and I get nervous when you go outside.”For a fourteen-track, thirty-minute album, it drags more than it should, especially towards its last third; however, Minor Love seems like an uncharacteristically minor LP ”“ an unassuming attempt at escaping from his showboating past, without diving headfirst back into four-track obscurity. For a songwriter as unpredictable as he is prolific, I doubt Adam Green will make us wait long to see where he ends up next...

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