Only 21, and already the veteran of five albums, Adam Green first came to these shores as half of the New York anti-folk duo Moldy Peaches. Last year's Friends of Mine, his third solo record but the first since they broke up, was effectively his solo debut, and its cool ballads and delicate string arrangements are a world away from the spontaneous garage racket of his former band. But anyone who thinks Green has gone from jokey to serious is missing the dark, disturbed flipside to the Moldy Peaches, as well as underestimating the subversive role his particularly pitch-black sense of humour plays in the new songs.

Fronting a new band, with deft keyboard player Nate Brown substituting lovely electric piano lines for the album's string parts, Green has an odd but undeniably charismatic presence - part inscrutable hipster, part dazed puppy. His new vocal style redefines laconic (poring over old Sinatra and Dean Martin records has clearly paid off) and often it's hard to remember he's so young. Certainly a bittersweet vignette like Prince's Bed seems extraordinarily world-weary for someone just old enough to buy alcohol in his home country.

His songs negotiate a deft conflation of gutter poetry, quasi-obscenity and buoyant melodic skill. Jessica, a skilful dissection of the blonde American former pop princess Jessica Simpson and, by extension, celebrity itself, wouldn't sound out of place on Radio 2; neither would the joyous lilt of Bluebirds or Friends of Mine. But songs like Gemstones (with the marvellous couplet "She's a show-off/ Xanax, Zoloft") and Crackhouse Blues suggest he's the sharpest poet of a certain kind of New York demi-monde since Lou Reed. The hushed solo encore of a new song, Can You See Me?, finds skin-pricking pathos among a tangle of apparently nonsensical imagery. However good he is now, he's clearly going to be even better very soon.