Butterfly Child’s Joe Cassidy still sounds awe-struck on The Honeymoon Suite, which is, perhaps, no surprise: he married around the time of the album’s writing and recording. The twelve songs here are less oblique and coded than his first rush of material (four EPs, and a debut album, Onomatopoeia), and while he still has a poet’s reverence for (and facility with) language, the writing here is more direct. The real change is in the way the music breathes – Richard Thomas’s drums give Cassidy’s songs a sturdiness they’d not had before; the addition of strings and horns nudge the album closer to a kind of ornate baroque, at times, that places it within the slipstream of ‘60s orch-pop. The key to The Honeymoon Suite, though, is Cassidy’s divine knack for melody.

– Jon Dale