Audio Mixers: Dan Myers; Adam Green ; Steven Mertens.

Recording information: Dirt Floor Studio, NJ; Loho Studios, New York, NY; Threshold Studios, New York, NY.

Photographer: Will Stern.

Vocalists: Nathan Brown; Parker Kindred; Steven Mertens.

Issued in early 2008, just as the surprisingly successful JUNO soundtrack garnered Adam Green and, moreso, his Moldy Peaches bandmate Kimya Dawson a sudden mainstream spotlight, SIXES & SEVENS finds the New York City-based singer-songwriter working his indie-crooner mojo. With his deep voice and wry lyrics, Green is something of a slacker Lee Hazlewood of the hipster set, as revealed on the string-tinged, slightly funky "Twee Twee Dee" and the boisterous "Broadcast Beach" (where he proclaims, "Hepatitis caught me off my guard"). Though some tunes nod to Green's lo-fi, anti-folk beginnings (see the spare, Beck-like "Cannot Get Sicker"), the album is most entertaining when the young singer goes for the gloss, a point reinforced by giddily over-the-top "Morning After Midnight."

Adam Green, the Moldy Peach who's made a name for himself on the fringes of the singer/songwriter community with his playful, sometimes crude, sometimes sweet, lyrics, returns to Rough Trade for his fifth solo release, Sixes & Sevens. With 20 tracks, the album gives more than enough glimpses at Green's wide-ranging stylings and influences ('50s pop, country, folk, blues-rock, pop, even hip-hop), but it is this very range that is also detrimental. Green can certainly write a decent pop song, but his tendency to jump from one musical theme to another is more distracting and bothersome than anything else. Instead of showing off his ability, Sixes & Sevens is a disjointed conglomeration of different ramblings that can't quite coalesce around any sort of idea. This is only accentuated by the fact that Green's songs themselves generally don't say much of anything, more focused on complex internal rhyme than meaning. The tracks, albeit short (only a couple are over three minutes) seem to drag on indefinitely, and though the album clocks in at just under 50 minutes, it feels as if much more time has passed when the final chords of "Rich Kids," an all-in-all decent song, are played. Green has so many voices, it's hard to know which one is his own. Is it the Tom Jones-esque one on the Hanson Brothers-helped "Twee Twee Dee"? The Stephen Malkmus on "Be My Man"? The Paul Simon on "You Get So Lucky"? Perhaps it's in the middle, where the singer launches into a medley that recalls his folkier days and manages to come across as both sentimental and quirky (take the touchingly open "Homelife," for example)? Sixes & Sevens is too much, too disparate, too nonsensical, to bring together its parts, so even though strong individual moments exist -- "Getting Led," the aforementioned "Homelife" -- as a whole it never quite sounds completed. ~ Marisa Brown