Preaching from the Pews: The Love The Language

lovelanguageFollowing recent shows supporting Arcade Fire in the US, The Love The Language will play their debut European shows later this year. So far they’ve confirmed an appearance at End Of The Road Festival on September 3rd.

Freshly signed to One Four Seven Records in the UK and Europe, and on Merge in the US, The Love Language will release Libraries, an album of future alt-pop classics on September 5th 2011.

The band, initiated by Stuart McLamb, is a fortunate by-product of the North Carolina native’s rudderless mid-20s. 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 multi-track recorder, became postcards from exile, a way to let his friends and former flames know he was getting along, battered but not beaten.

The Love Language was never intended to be a band,” explains McLamb. “Those songs were never intended to be for anyone except my ex-girlfriend. That was my outlet, and at one point, it caught fire.”  The self-immolating beauty of the budget correspondences was exhausting and triumphant.

Although his self-titled debut, The Love Language, was applauded for its fashionable fidelity, it was more of a testament to the impulsive nature of his art than about contributing to a larger movement. “Lo-Fi is almost an anti-aesthetic, for me it’s more about “Let’s capture the moment.” Among the moments captured on his One Four Seven Records debut 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 one taster they’ve allowed to seap out to the public is the free download ‘Pedals’ below, a sweepingly tune that bares swooning choral hallmarks are brave and tender. Swelling through delicately arranged orchestration and collapsing into gloriously melodic cresendos not too dissimilar to the the early work of Arcade Fire or The Decemberists!

The Love Language – ‘Pedals’ (One Four Seven Records) by One Four Seven Records

God is in the TV is an online music and culture fanzine founded in Cardiff by the editor Bill Cummings in 2003. GIITTV Bill has developed the site with the aid of a team of sub-editors and writers from across Britain, covering a wide range of music from unsigned and independent artists to major releases.