Nothing like being a good looking young lad and having to daydream up the miseries of relationships with girls to appease all of the necessary spots in your songs where lyrics should go. Conquesting and telling is better left to Gene Simmons and Tenacious D or someone similar. For most intents in rock and roll, portraying oneself as that lucked out weiner with a heart of gold, the best intentions, a terrible history with the co-eds and a nifty vocabulary is standard practice and seen as the very best method to take if one was searching for a method to use.
Thine is to go forth and seek the hemorrhaging love, the unbearable darkened heaviness of being and wrapping a huge bear hug around its midsection and squeezing it for all it's worth, that or grabbing it by the ankles, holding it upside down and shaking all of the loose change out of it, with the same exact force you'd use to shimmy that package of Sour Patch Kids that the vending machine left dangling on the coil due to a timing malfunction. But, even the super good-looking get the wind knocked out of them by the matters of the heart occasionally, take Jennifer Love Hewitt as one possible example. It can be a real beat down, that crapshoot.
The Honorary Title's lead singer, Jarrod Gorbel, on the surface, looks about right to slay a certain kind of gal early and often. The effort that he would have to put into taking home or getting invited to a home by a fetching female would be heinously little. He must get the offers all the time. To not lead you astray into thinking that Gorbel is all about sex the same way that Buckcherry's Josh Todd is all about the cocaine, it's important to note that anyone who gets on stage with microphones, amplification and lighting made from bulbs spilling through a veneer of red and blue pieces of plastic paper is aware of the instantaneous aphrodisiac-like powers that rise like steam. It's why those people dress in tight jeans and do fashionable things with their hairstyles.
The Honorary Title have natural peers in bands such as Saves the Day, the Lawrence, Kansas scene of early emo in the mid-90s and fellows like Mike Kinsella and Jason Molina should they have gone in a slightly different creative direction. They have grandfathers in The Cure, embracing the blue Mondays, the Tuesdays that are gray and the Wednesdays too and forgetting completely that Fridays are the days that they're supposed to be in love, no exceptions.
Gorbel, who in our requested liner notes alludes to two songs being sarcastic, and the rest of this Brooklyn-based do not make sloppy, garden variety emotional rock. There are craftier bits of storytelling. There is a belief that the song must take on thoughts about breakups and rough patches in the road with an approach that stays plainly earnest but teams up with a secondary approach that jettisons worn out content and conceptual normalities. There is mood and some slight hipster brawn. There are whiffs of what could be a new derivation of Americana as seen through the eyes of the Dashboard Confessional support system.