Things have gone sour for the young man in The Donnies The Amys songs. He's dealing with a love on the fence, though from the sound of things, the trail leg is making its way over it as we speak, just doing so slowly, methodically - one of the cruelest teases that a person could go through. Donnie Logan sings, "You don't really want me/You're just holding onto the thought/Aren't you?/My lonely heart," on "Boxer + Clover," a song that makes heartbreak feel like a rough morning, like a biting rain, but a wake-up call all the same. It might actually do some good, when all is said and done. It's just too early to tell. Logan and drummer Amy Wood travel across a lot of different terrain with their music, with the duo sounding like a much more nuanced Jack and Meg, like the boozy love notes of the poets to the damned/themselves, like the crumbling of brittle dreams, like strange, new-age folk. It's where we've caught these people - in the grasp of a change from being open and nurturing people, to being those who aren't going to give so much of themselves because they now know where that gets them. They've been burned and they know that similar behavior - if they were to engage in or encourage it - would result in subsequent burnings and they'd rather just be perplexed than be the other. Logan sings, "The way that you put things makes it all the more confusing," about a relationship that's getting tossed around, mishandled and leveraged. What comes next is a precautionary measure such as the one in "Machines," where all of the hard work has now been farmed out to machines. It's for them to take care of the touching, the caring, the loving and wanting. It's these reliable and malleable, easily bent back into shape machines to do all of the listening and all of the trusting - those tedious and daunting tasks that were once required of lovers. Left up to the hunks of metal, with the artificial and non-discerning intelligence and nobody gets hurt.