Roxy Music taught us love can be a drug, but I don't think I've ever heard a song that depicts love and drugs coexisting together, and more or less equally helpful.

"I couldn't make it without you-without you and codeine."

So goes the chorus of "Codeine," one of six songs on the debut album by Pillow Army. The song, like much of the band's work, rides a fine line between sentimentality and cynicism.

Or maybe it's just good humor. Hard to say.

Take "The Price" as another example. On first listen, the song sounds like a harsher version of Okkervil River's "Singer-Songwriter" - an indictment of a so-called artist, this time relishing that the subject's lavish lifestyle will soon do him in.

But listening again, "The Price" starts to sounds more like Tim Franklin, Pillow Army's frontman, is condemning people who stand by and watch train wrecks - just like the one he describes.

In the end, though, Franklin may just find it funny - and I might, too.

Pillow Army is a band all about opposing elements. Acoustic guitar and a string section make up the body of most of the songs, but - more times than not - that calm is stabbed by raucous intrusions from loud electric guitars, working as a counterpoint to the loveliness of the other instrumentation.

"That's the sort of concept," says Franklin. "Even with the name: Pillow Army. Having the angular rock and having the sort of softness of the strings, at times clashing and at times working together."

Pillow Army is influenced by purveyors of a certain kind of aggressive folk, a brood Neutral Milk Hotel certainly belongs to. Franklin's band has even gone so far as to invite criticism with a cover of "Oh Comely," the towering emotional centerpiece of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - a move that some would call blasphemous.

And here, again, I'm tempted to call cynicism. But I give Pillow Army the benefit of the doubt.

We can't all love Anne Frank, but we can feel deeply for Jeff Mangum, and I think Tim Franklin does.

[The New Frontier Lounge, with These Are The End Times, Keg-The Lone Ranger of Rock, Thursday, April 15, 9 p.m., cover TBA, 301 E. 25th St., Tacoma, 253.572.4020]