The Love Language Baby Grand

Gatefold LP.You may not be able to see the gorgeous landscapes behind Baby Grand, Stuart McLamb's fourth record as The Love Language, but they're so essential to the picture you'll feel them in every note. Started in, of all places, a cavernous Virginia hammockfactory, fragmentary demos came alive when splashed by sunshine during a move across the country to California, where the album was completed. "It was something just about being in a new city, and a new light," McLamb says, "and reopening the sessions, and this demo that I thought was a throwaway, suddenly I'm really feeling it." You can hear the freedom kick in when the backwoods country shuffle of "Castle in the Sky" explodes into a full-on aughts anthem, equal parts outstretchedarms and pumped fists. Yet so much lies in the shadows behind these tracks: other states, other lives, other dreams, other relationships_fogged over, perhaps, but there nonetheless. Yes, Baby Grand has its share of breakup songs_nobody writes those better than McLamb... but this time, even as something is being mourned, something else is being worked through; as lovers have been left behind, so have places and a time in life. Listen as the heartbreak and yearning of "New Amsterdam" come crashing down into the beautiful stasis of "Southern Doldrums" (the former was inspired by Cyndi Lauper and Joy Division, McLamb claims, while the latter draws upon John Cale's meditative solorecords), or as the beautiful lift of the startling sequence of songs that make up Baby Grand's propulsive midsection gives way to a moody instrumental called "Rain/Delay," a collection of distant plinks and plonks struggling to assemble themselves into melody. "I've embraced the idea that getting murky is what the band is," says McLamb of the various assemblies of players and the various genre influences that have fueled The Love Language at different points in time. "I love bands like the Ramones that have one thing that really works, and I love a good restaurant that serves one really good...