Album of the Week: Tobias Jesso Jr. Goon

You don't hear piano as the lead instrument much these days.

For a while there, Coldplay and Keane were the lead ambassadors of the notion that the piano is still a viable rock instrument, but Coldplay transitioned to the guitar and string sounds championed by U2, and Keane…well, I'm not sure what happened to Keane.

There was a time in the 50s and 60s when the piano was the primary songwriting instrument (hell, it might still be, I'm no musician) for some truly, truly classic songs.

Tobias Jesso Jr. would have fit right in during that era, but on his debut album, Goon, he manages to create music that feels both of its time, and timeless.

Jesso channels a variety of classic rock songwriters on Goon, from Carole King and Harry Nilsson to Jackson Browne and Randy Newman – all writers who were able to produce shimmeringly lovely music from a simple palette. On all but two of the 12 songs on the album, the piano and Jesso's boy-next-door voice are front and center, and he sings with an untrained earnestness that marked so much of the aforementioned artists' best work.

Jesso knows how to push his voice when he wants to – check out the way his comes this close to breaking near the end of "How Could You Babe" as he pleads for understanding from a former flame.

The man is staggeringly capable of writing a hook – "Can We Still Be Friends" has a King piano line that is immediately accessible and infectious, and Jesso pairs it with his best young Paul McCartney plea. "Leaving LA" is another impossibly catchy piano-driven number that quietly builds to a gorgeous choral climax.

"The Wait" and album closer "Tell The Truth" prove that Jesso is as skilled on the guitar as he is on the piano - both are incredibly catchy finger-picked acoustic numbers that sound like they could've come from either Browne or James Taylor in their heydays.

Jesso isn't a complete throwback artist, however, and while he certainly embraces the pop stylings from the 60s, he isn't afraid to bring his own flourishes to the songs.

On "Hollywood" Jesso manages to channel both Newman and Death Cab for Cutie's "Why You'd Want to Live Here" without any of the expected bitterness. It's just him and his piano, singing like he's the only guy in some dive bar on the strip, about to give up on Los Angeles and crawl away. When he brings the horns in at the end of the song, they bleat and blare like they're the first line is his shambling pity parade. There's a little bit of Radiohead in the way the horns cut across Jesso's piano – it's wildly emotive without using any words.

"Crocodile Tears" is hilarious, tongue-in-cheek ode to a ball-breaker who leaves him in ruins that features the best Elton John piano-work this side of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the electric guitars are straight out of a George Harrison solo – a little strange at first, but it completely fits the song.

Looking back at what I've written so far, you've probably noticed how much I'm referencing other artists in this piece. This could lead you to think if you're already fans of the source material, there's no need to sample Goon. And that's wrong.

Perhaps the most impressive feat on this simple gem of an album is the way Jesso manages to funnel all these influences through his lovesick worldview. He sounds like the young man he is, wiser than his years, but still dumb enough to keep falling in love with the wrong people. In time – one hopes – he'll learn wisdom, but as Goon ably proves, he's further ahead than most.

Goon is out on True Panther Sounds.

Album of the Week: Father John Misty I Love You, Honeybear

With love songs as ubiquitous as they are these days, particularly since we're staring down the barrel of another Valentine's Day as I write this, it's easy to not give them a lot of thought. For most people it's enough to have a beautiful turn of phrase and lovely melody and that's about it.

Father John Misty (real name Josh Tillman) is not one of those people.

Listening to his new album I Love You, Honeybear (and reading his delightful album notes and instructions for listening, which you can do here) it's clear he spent a lot of time thinking about love songs – the bullshit clichés that get recycled over and over, the melodramatic narratives and over indulgent sonicscapes.

On Honeybear, Tillman takes all these aspects of love songs and bends them to his hilarious, warped, and ultimately human will.

In his notes Tillman admits the album sounds a bit like Scott Walker, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, and Dory Previn, but when I listen (which I have been doing incessantly) I hear early Tom Waits (circa ClosingTime and The Heart of Saturday Night, specifically). There's the same biting humor, the same hidden romance and lush orchestration that made those early recordings so swooningly romantic, even at their bitterest.

The strings are the most prominent instruments on Honeybear (outside of Tillman's rock-you-back vocals, which I'll get to in a moment) and they are used to brilliant effect, from channeling mariachi music on "Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)" to adding subtle depths to "I Went To The Store One Day." Tillman said he found a way to make Honeybear sound both dense and spacious, and the use of strings is how he does it.

The real star of the show here is the lyrics and the way Tillman delivers them. The guy was a member of Fleet Foxes – a band that made a name for itself in large part due to the gorgeous waterfall of harmonies they created – so he knows how to lay you out flat with his voice. Just listen to the way he calls out his lyrics when all the music drops out on "Strange Encounter" or the way he howls out his faults on "Ideal Husband." From a tears-in-beers weeper like "Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goodamn Thirsty Crow" to the Passion Pit-esque electronica of "True Affection," Tillman has figured out how to use his voice in just the right way, no matter what the song is.

What reminds me most of Waits (one of the most literary of rockers) on Honeybear are Tillman's lyrics. Each song reads like a David Foster Wallace or John Updike novel in four -minutes or less – so specific to his experiences and yet so relatable to the listener. In his notes he writes that before working on the album, he never really knew how to write a love song. Once he started in on it, however, he wanted to get rid of clichés when talking about self-doubt, romantic inadequacies and the state of the world.

You can hear this desire clearest on "When You're Smiling and Astride Me," a song so fucking gorgeous that I had to hit pause to take it in after listening for the first time. The way he works both sex and fear together on lines like " When you're smiling and astride me/I can hardly believe I've found you and I'm terrified by that" is startling in its clarity. The extra heft he gives the word "smiling" when he sings it can break you if you let it.

You can hear this desire in the LOL-worthy way he bitches about his lady's pretentiousness on "The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment": "She says, like literally, music is the air she breathes/ And the malaprops make me want to fucking scream/I wonder if she even knows what that word means/Well, it's literally not that." Two verses later he blasts the silly black culture appropriation that has been doing on for ages: "We sang 'Silent Night' in three parts which was fun/Till she said that she sounds just like Sarah Vaughan/I hate that soulful affectation white girls put on/Why don't you move to the Delta?" It's Bob Dylan's "Positively 4thStreet" for the Vine generation.

You can hear this desire in "Bored in the USA," a biting look at the ways modern America lets its population down that would make Randy Newman proud. The laugh track he lays under the second half of the song is a little on the nose, but his observations like, " How many people rise and think/'Oh good, the stranger's body's still here/Our arrangement hasn't changed?'" are so poignant you can forgive anything. Yes, he's cribbing Springsteen's melody from "Born in the USA" for the chorus, but his laments to be saved by "White Jesus" boil down religious fanaticism in America to a punchline – no small feat. (Let's take a second to appreciate the fact that "Born in the USA" is actually about a Vietnam veteran getting screwed over by his country once he returns from the war. I think Tillman's use of one of Springsteen's most misunderstood songs for this track is inspired. End aside.)

Truthfully, you can hear this desire on every song here, but the most devastating one-two punch comes on the last two: "Holy Shit" and "I Went To The Store One Day." They're both the most straight forward folk songs on Honeybear, and also the simplest – all finger-picked acoustic guitars and glittering strings.

"Holy Shit" is about how fucked up the world is, how the chaos impacts our daily life and he explores the effects of these two ideas to devastating results. The way Tillman marries the despair in lyrics like "Oh, and no one ever knows the real you and life is brief/So I've heard, but what's that gotta do with this atom bomb and me?" to the hope of "Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity/What I fail to see is what that's gotta do with you and me?" is simply astounding.

"I Went To The Store One Day" has to be the most romantic thing Tillman has ever recorded, and the simple way he describes meeting his wife Emma (the inspiration for the album) is stunning, but what makes the song stand out is the directness. Up to this point, Tillman had buried his romance beneath an avalanche of nonchalance and incrimination, both of his partner and himself. Here, he lets love be pure – " For love to find us of all people/I never thought it be so simple." After an album of questions and doubt, to arrive at a point where he can write that with such honesty, that's a major achievement. Ending the album with the first thing he said to his wife, "'Seen you around, what's your name?'" eloquently sums up the man he has become in the process.

Shakespeare wrote "The course of true love never did run smooth" and Tillman takes listeners on his intensely personal journey on that course on I Love You, Honeybear. By immersing the listener in the intimate and interpersonal, he's created something bigger than himself – a portrait of love in the modern age. It's a wonder.

I Love You, Honeybear is out on Bella Union.