The Love Language
1am, Cedar Street Courtyard
By Austin Powell, Fri., March 19, 2010
If love is a language, songwriter Stuart McLamb isn't exactly fluent. His self-titled debut as the Love Language, released early last year on Portland's Bladen County, is a sobering portrait of adolescent heartbreak, his longing and remorse overdubbed and blurred with reverb and natural four- track distortion.
McLamb's lo-fi piano pop juxtaposes the unnerving vulnerability of Daniel Johnston with the immediacy of Lee Hazelwood's lush productions. While the Chapel Hill, NC., outfit barreled into South by Southwest last year as a seven-person caravan, its composer played every instrument on the disc, which he self-recorded in a rented storage space after moving back in with his family.
"It really came out of more or less a dark period in my life," McLamb relates. "I blacked out on a fifth of Aristocrat Vodka and tried to fight all of my friends in the room and then some police officers. Not that I remember any of that. It was a pretty big mess. I hope I don't go through that again, but maybe I do if I get some good tunes."
McLamb cleaned up nicely for the Love Language's forthcoming debut for Merge Records, Libraries, an abstract reference to the combination of the horoscope signs Libra and Aries. The LP was recorded in an actual studio over the course of about two months, with McLamb once more handling the majority of the instrumentation.
"There's a lot more fidelity I guess you could say," prefaces McLamb. "It's the typical sophomore album where you add the horns and the strings, but I always wanted to do a big album. I love big production immediacy, when you hear a moment perfectly captured."