In the fourteen songs on this album, we engage those mythic ethereal sirens of the last album, and force them to do more than sing: to touch us, to interact. And this more visceral involvement with the subject is evident not only in the words, but in the music, which are less ascetic, more aggressive. The first track, "Calm Me Down", pairs anticipated off-beat bass with a lightly-plucked melody as it asks "put your hand on my stomach and / calm me down", inviting touch as salve, recognizing the power of contact. Conversely, recognizing the double-edged side of that power, the next song, "Good Morning" asks for the opposite: "so slap me silent knock me down / dig a little hole in the ground / and kiss me goodbye".

Not only do we have engagement with the subjects of the songs, but we have blame-blame both laid and shared. It may be dealt callously, ambivalently, even casually, but it is distributed nonetheless, rather than taken on unilaterally as we saw in Couch the Comfort. From track 9: "fuck you me friend / cuz I need you now / but you don't give a damn". And more explicitly on track 5: "and I've lost the urge to control my life / and I blame it all on you". Here we do not hear the lament "look what I have become" as we did on the last album; instead, on Milk and Honey, we hear the accusation "look what you have made me".
This changes the dynamic of the album subtly, this dismissal of guilt with the concordant ascension of blame. The music has transitioned from romantic melancholy to more aggressive-even angry-rock. Though one shouldn't think the anger is directed solely outward-it isn't. But it is newly present.
There are sweet notes on the album, sure, like the title track, "Milk and Honey", a melodic jam. And yet, even on a song whose upper-register solos and syncopated stops invite you to dance, the lyrics reveal a darker sentiment. There are no happy endings here, just happy faces. The album is, in many ways, defined by these dichotomies of sweet and sour. It puts on a light face and hides a sinister heart. Perhaps instead of Milk and Honey, the album should have been named after its third track, "Psycho Killer" (a cover of the Talking Heads song by the same name). But, no. The lyrics, the instrumentals, these are perhaps the blush of a complicated mask, because, for all the anger, the love, the forlorn desperation of this record, there remains the singular distant muezzin calling meditatively against the vibrant pastiche of the sunset; above and interwoven with the ambivalent music is the redemptive ascension of a composite beauty. The heart here is not truly sinister. The album and its many protagonists, we among them, truly want to be good. But it's a jungle out there, and, when you're hacking through leaves and vines trying to get to the Promised Land ("where is my milk and honey…"), sometimes it's hard to see the light. And sometimes, in the darkness and fog you say things you don't mean. You swing at friends instead of foes. We all do.