Chaos Control By Grayson Currin
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he first time Raleigh five-piece The Love Language played the songs from its second album, the soulful and swollen Libraries, it was a debut that seemed engineered for chaos — or entropy, at least. Less than three hours before show time, the band’s frontman and founder, Stu McLamb, sent an elliptical invitation to friends. “Mass text,” it read. “Love lang warehouse show tonight @ 324 dupont circle raleigh.” It was the first Friday of March — a balmy hinge between the Tar Heel winter and spring, and a night where, thanks to the city’s monthly public art walk, every rock club, gallery and dive bar expected big crowds. A friend asked McLamb to play a small birthday party in an artist’s workshop that overlooks the capital’s downtown from a small residential bluff. By 10 p.m., cars crammed into spaces that didn’t quite exist, and bikes rested against walls and street signs. Inside, people passed plastic cups and glass bottles, and pulled domestic tallboys from brown paper bags. Eventually, the band ambled to one end of the concrete-floored, block-walled warehouse, picked up instruments and started playing. No fanfare or introductions were necessary. The people in attendance were among the city’s cognoscenti — friends of the band, friends of the celebrants, fixtures of the scene, all mingling in their respective circles. They understood what was happening. But no one knew exactly how it would happen. Months before, The Love Language had been one of the tightest bands in town — a good-looking, model-ready six-piece, with two keyboardists, two guitarists and a rhythm section (with lots of tambourines, mind you) that pounded the songs like fists into faces or aches into hearts. Their harmonies were strong, and their image might have been stronger: handsome but hardscrabble indie dudes, flanked by dual gorgeous brunettes. Depending on your perspective, though, the night’s show would
16 shuffle eight The Love Language
either be the first gig or the third rehearsal for this brand-new band. McLamb’s older brother, who had played second guitar in the first iteration, now towered above the drums. Bassist Justin Rodermond, who had managed McLamb’s old indie rock band The Capulets, drove down from D.C. to learn the songs three days before the warehouse gig. He hadn’t seen McLamb in years. Maybe tonight would be a disaster. Maybe they wouldn’t make it off the nonexistent stage still a band. But The Love Language — or, more specifically, McLamb — consistently turns inauspicious and even disastrous beginnings into unlikely successes. In 2007, police in the Raleigh suburb of Cary arrested him for getting too drunk and too aggressive. At 27, he moved back in with his parents and began cobbling together a self-made set of love-crushed, earnest demos that became The Love Language’s eponymous first album. A record deal, a booking agent and a wave of hype followed. McLamb formed a live band. Not long after signing to Merge Records, one of the biggest independent record labels in America, he fired it. He moved from Chapel Hill to Raleigh, cloistered himself inside a studio with producer B.J. Burton and, during the dead of winter of 2010, made Libraries — a record so summery, listening to it feels like a command to have more fun. And that’s exactly how that night in the warehouse, when Libraries had its semi-public first dance, felt: The band missed some cues and the guitars — played now by Burton and McLamb — occasionally slipped from their shared parts. But the sound, loud and blustery, bounced off the surfaces as listeners whirled in front of the band and, occasionally, sashayed between the members. People, sweating, left less sober than they had arrived. It felt like a school’s spring informal, where the chaperones followed one another home, or at least to the next bar. And the winter, finally, was over.