One of the many delights of The Amazing Devil's love songs is that we feel like we're somehow getting a glimpse into real people's lives. There are such beautifully specific details. The guy from Pruning Shears wears secondhand shoes to fancy parties, the couple from Not Yet builds pillow dens. The lady in Marbles works with assholes who make annoying comments, and the guy in Fair likes to eat yoghurt while watching The Office. The couple in Ruin plays the piano together, and so on. These songs are as far away from the generic, manufactured-for-maximum-marketability hits churned out by big music studios as you can get.
The magic of it is that the specificity doesn't stop TAD's songs from being relatable. Far from it. Because even though some of the scenarios are foreign to my own life ("Everyone knows sex is better when you're unemployed." News to me, Joey.), the emotions are always deeply, unflinchingly honest. They feel authentic. These songs aren't telling you to insert yourself into a readymade fill-in-the-blanks love story. They're saying, "Hey you, sitting over there grappling with all the twists and turns of being a human who needs other humans? You are not alone."
