The Love Language
Libraries
[Merge]

Every time he has a relationship meltdown, Stuart McLamb rolls tape and pours his heart into a recording that may or may not reach the public ear. That at least was The Love Language frontman’s MO until he recently met incredibly receptive audiences touring with The Rosebuds and at the 2009 South by Southwest festival. Not bad for a heart broken, down and out twenty-something who set out with a guitar and a four track recorder to write songs he quoted as “never intended to be for anyone except [his] ex-girlfriend.” A year later, McLamb set out with a knapsack full of monetary misfortunes and relationships gone awry, a record deal with Merge, and his newly established five-piece band to capture the urgent sincerity by which they have come to be known in thirty minutes and ten tracks.

The Love Language fills Libraries with easily accessible, pop friendly narratives, slipping pages of hardship, and distress between coarse yet catchy musical illustrations. The mid-tempo ballad “This Blood Is Our Own” opens with almost reverent piano and organ lines over a subdued 6/8 shuffling drum pattern, all of which backs McLamb’s mournful tenor. Effectively bleeding string arrangements and angelic choral vocal accompaniment support a weeping slide guitar solo that fills the mid-song instrumental section, and the same orchestral composition ushers listeners through the song’s final minute and a half. Warm and sunny vocal harmonies return again in “Anthophobia” and clearly demonstrate The Love Language’s surf-rock sensibility as tremolo guitars provide a backdrop. Granted, heavily overdriven amps and full volume pulsating cymbal crashes may obscure a Beach Boys influence on this number, but the closing track “This Room” seems to be more of a direct reference to the seminal sixties So-Cal troop, both in title and timbre.

Whether or not McLamb and company will eventually have to find a muse outside the realm of a disappointing love life is a question that only time will answer. The material The Love Language has drum up so far undoubtedly speaks to the simultaneously heart wrenching and artistically inspiring nature of hard times, and there never seems to be a shortage of fans who naturally identify with emotional adversity.