Tracklist: I Love You, Honeybear / Chateaux Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins) / True Affection / The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt. / When You're Smiling and Astride Me / Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Cow / Strange Encounter / The Ideal Husband / Bored in the USA / Holy Shit / I Went To The Store One Day // 

This album was introduced to me last year, so quite a while ago now and it's only in this past month that I've listened to it once again.

There's a lot that's familiar when you hear the album, little elements that are reminders of, Fleet Foxes, which is a given considering he was in the band. These familiar little elements are the way he exploits the vocal parts in the album. However, the majority of the album is his own, it sounds a lot clearer and a lot more structured and put together than the Fleet Foxes work does - when comparing it to their most recent album, Helplessness Blues. I Love You, Honeybear is full of brilliant arrangements, both traditional, and electronic and minimal.

The opening and title track of the album, I Love You, Honeybear, gives you a feel of how well arranged and orchestrated the album is going to be as it incorporates an array of instruments - synths, percussion, brass, wind and strings. There’s a combination of vocal focal points – Tillman’s voice and backing vocals – these are brought together with reverb to create this more open and empty soundscape, which contrasts the large arrangement in how that’s been recorded and edited as the arrangement has less reverb, it’s clear, feels closer and less of an open empty space.

The lyrics throughout the entirety of the album are definitely something that cannot go unmentioned. Tillman being a folk-singer (-generally first-person songwriters with traditional/natural sounding arrangements who tell stories through their lyrics of their life, and sometimes about others) kind of gives some input as to why his lyrics are the way they are even if they are given with a brutal honesty. When listening to his lyrics you can hear what he means when he said how he “just wanted to write about love without bullshitting myself or anyone else”. With lines like - “Oh, and love is just an institution based on human fraility / What’s your paradise gotta do with Adam and Eve?”, “Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity / but what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me”, “Bored in the USA / Oh, they gave me useless education / And a subprime loan / On a craftsman home” – it’s pretty obvious he wasn’t trying to bullshit anyone.

Chateaux Lobby #4 is a brilliant track. It takes full advantage of the orchestration provided – with the strings section producing fluttery, fairy-tale glissandos, a canon of instruments doubling each other (brass > wind > strings) – all of this fitting in with the intended “romance”: “people are boring / but you’re something else I can’t explain / you can take my last name”. These elements in the strings sections are also evident in Strange Encounter along with the added depth of legato strong lines. The orchestration of this album is something to be proud of and shouldn’t be overlooked from his lyrics.

Some of the lyrics you don't know whether to take as a joke or seriously - the arrangments are brilliantly well done - you take those seriously and then you hear what he's singing about and it's kind of hillariously cynical. It's a brilliant album, and with the depth of the lyrics there's always something new to hear.