Massachusetts-native Colleen Green‘s I Want to Grow Up, her second LP for Hardly Art, is a hit, pure and simple, the stuff snobby record store clerks might roll their eyes at as “derivative,” but Green doesn’t give a shit. Though the title is a cheeky reference to the Descendents’ I Don’t Want to Grow Up, Green’s third LP isn’t a caricature of her influences. She’d much rather go back to a simpler time, despite the fact that the ’80s drum machine, her only official bandmate for live gigs, has largely been replaced by a full band that includes drummer Casey Weissbuch of Diarrhea Planet. And for the first time, Green’s bedroom-pop has gotten a makeover by a gifted producer and shredder, Jake Orrall of JEFF the Brotherhood.
The result is Green’s high-floating voice taking center stage amid power-pop clarity that sounds like a stoned Nina Gordon (Veruca Salt) fronting Blue Album-era Weezer. The 10-tracks on I Want to Grow Up capture Green’s scribbled journal entries over the course of five years, ever since moving to L.A. and dealing with depression, health problems, and the social phobias associated with being an iconoclast in a city full of sun-soaked Barbie dolls. It’s an instantly relatable record that balances the darkly personal on Green’s version of a six-minute rap song, “Deeper Than Love,” with the hummable irreverence of “TV,” which is about as brainy as Green Day’s jerk-off anthem, “Longview,” and just as catchy and well-produced. But calling this record “polished” doesn’t quite make sense; Green is too detached from the hipness of the modern blank generation to get compared to mainstream pop acts. Ten years from now, when she’s 40, I Want to Grow Up will be the moment Colleen Green made anti-cool en vogue again – like Kurt Cobain singing “I rather be dead than cool” back in 1991.
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Stream the album below, which will be released on Hardly Art on February 24. You can orderI Want to Grow Up now.
