The twisted and freakish appeal of Adam Green

Adam Green leads the New York “anti-folk” group the Moldy Peaches, known for delivering its sometimes scatological songs while wearing strange costumes on stage. As a solo artist, the singer-songwriter could be called an “anti-crooner,” as his Thursday show at Largo simultaneously evoked and twisted up such acts as Leonard Cohen, Jonathan Richman, the Velvet Underground and the Cure.

Green, 21, played a 45-minute set with his own trio of drums, bass and guitar, plus the borrowed local String Quartet, which performed the string parts from his current album, “Friends of Mine.” Hanging onto the microphone stand like a Mick Jagger parodist, he delivered in a smooth, near-deadpan voice pithy tunes that were at once weird, precious, sexual, funny and kind of gross, yet they often had a pop craft and flow that recalled the contradictory appeal of the Flaming Lips.

Freakish though his songs were, they often were nothing more than begging tunes by someone with no idea how to get a date. He mocked the travails of the fair sex in “Hard to Be a Girl,” became insistently stalker-ific with “The Prince’s Bed,” tenderly reproached teen-popper Jessica Simpson in “Jessica,” but seemed melancholy over losing a friend in “Bungee.”

He indulged in truly spastic dancing, and cracked up a couple of times after dropping some groaningly awful throwaway lines. Although the emotional center was elusive, there wasn’t a sense of artifice so much as archness. Still, some lines about being afraid to die felt poignant and hinted at substance beneath the satire.