Album: Adam Green, Sixes & Sevens (Rough Trade)

With The Moldy Peaches' music featuring in the film Juno, Adam Green's stock has never been higher – which may account for his easygoing tone on this fifth solo album.

With settings ranging from the Caribbean lilt picked out on guitar and glockenspiel for "Tropical Island" to the pan pipes riding the misshapen gait of "You Get So Lucky", it's Green's most ambitious set yet. But his songwriting style retains that idiosyncratic blend of the comforting and the disarming, in which occasionally strange, unsettling images are smuggled in under cover of bland arrangements.

Green's engaging gentleness recalls Josh Rouse's knowing innocence, but the simpering tone of his delivery ultimately irritates: he's more like the surrealist Burl Ives, jovially recounting whimsical ditties of so little consequence that one never frets much about their meaning. The best track is "Twee Twee Dee", a pastiche of Willie Mitchell's classic string-laced Memphis soul grooves, spoilt by Green's soul-free baritone croon. The best line is the most straightforwardly political: "I was a nation bound to my station/ Getting led, getting led, getting led".

Download this: 'Twee Twee Dee', 'Tropical Island', 'Getting Led'