***"On THE LOVE LANGUAGE's most recent tour opening for Teenage Fanclub, we played for lots of fresh ears, many of whom came to the merch table after the show and asked, 'If you had to pick one, which of your albums is your favorite?' That’s a very tough question, like trying to pick a favorite child. While it’s hard to call it 'best,' it’s impossible to deny that our self-titled record is and will always be the most sentimental to me. It’s where it all started. A collection of 'demos' posted every couple months on Myspace between 2007 and 2008 until we were signed to our first label, Portland, Oregon’s Bladen County Records, who compiled them all as a full LP in 2009. The songs came effortlessly, and each one was recorded by a mobile multitrack recorder in various rooms (storage spaces, the back office of a record store, living rooms) throughout North Carolina literal hours after it was conceived. There’s a freshness and vitality to these songs that I hope, but don’t expect, to recapture again. It’s the sound of a songwriter discovering their voice in real time. The record has been out of print on vinyl for a few years now, and I’m excited to reissue it with some slight updates to the original packaging with my friends at Merge Records!"—Stuart McLamb. Pressed on yellow vinyl.
LP $18.85
07/12/2019
***Friends and fans of THE LOVE LANGUAGE songwriter and frontman STUART MCLAMB have learned to expect a lot, but rarely in a timely manner. Completing a triumvirate of spiritual transmissions spent lost (2009’s The Love Language) and found (2010’s Libraries), 2013’s Ruby Red exorcises the transient brilliance fostered by McLamb within the sheetrock walls of the album’s namesake artist space. Featuring over twenty musicians and straddling several time zones, The Love Language’s lone puppeteer borrowed heavier equipment, and held on to it longer. Initiated in a windowless unit at the fabled Ruby Red, several failed attempts and false starts at a songwriting spree landed McLamb and his engineer/case worker/boxing coach BJ BURTON in Black Mountain, North Carolina, consuming every square inch of a carpeted bungalow located a few acres too close to their skittish neighbors. Soon after, Burton’s relocation to Minneapolis effectively thrust McLamb from their shared nest, helping Ruby Red discover its inherent propensity for flight. Ruby Red produces new standards for the Carolina pop songbook, finding The Love Language as an extroverted community art project made by responsible citizens of a loosely packed scene who know that McLamb will match whatever they contribute. The heartbreak is over. Now we’re getting somewhere. No Export. (STREET DATE - 7/23/2013)
LP $17.50
07/23/2013
CD $13.50
07/23/2013
***THE LOVE LANGUAGE, initiated by STUART MCLAMB, is a fortunate by-product of the North Carolina native’s rudderless mid-20s, where a tempest of breakup, inebriation, and incarceration found the abandoned songwriter embarking on a storage-space recording project to slow his seeming disintegration. The growing body of emotional fight songs, committed to MP3 with a high-school era multitrack recorder, became postcards from exile, a way to let his friends and former flames know he was getting along, battered but not beaten. The self-immolating beauty of the budget correspondences was exhausting and triumphant; McLamb’s dalliances with rejection and redemption would be minted in a self-titled debut on Portland independent label Bladen County in March of 2009. McLamb, who had roamed the state since recording The Love Language, moved back to Raleigh where Libraries engineer/producer BJ BURTON adopted the one-man band and helped harness the extraordinary might generated during these sessions. Among the moments captured on Libraries are Spector-esque walls of reckless sound, cavernous drums, middle-school percussion, and moody swells of stringed instruments, all decorated hastily with stray leads, which bleed beautifully all over everything. The effective average of McLamb’s madness and Burton’s discipline rendered an album in the classic sense, in which no song is expendable and no passage is without purpose. With Libraries, McLamb transitioned from a guy who could write a good album to an individual who can maintain a good band. The sooner we listen, the sooner we may figure this whole love thing out. (STREET DATE - 7/13/2010)
LP $16.35
08/03/2010
CD $13.50
07/13/2010