pop. He wraps his best Morrissey croon around the alliteration and ambiguities of “Pedals,” the album’s feedback-and-organlaced gambit. “Wilmont,” the album’s penultimate and perfect anthem, builds through three distinct phases, culminating in a triumphant build and fade strong enough to blow back The Arcade Fire’s hair. As any good storyteller would have it, McLamb recorded “Wilmont” partially on a cheap tape machine that belonged to his father in college. It clicks on at the song’s start and off at the end — a gesture of tension and the answer of resolution, bookending a proverb-rich song about the compromise of any real relationship. Ultimately, the heart does what it does. The head — or the bandleader — worries about the story later. “You want me to haunt you/ but you’ve started sprouting your wings,” McLamb sings as the song glows and grows. He smiles as he sings the words, a snake with questionable intentions. “I could lie to love you, but my mockingbird’s gonna sing.” • • • “There might be some old friends here I haven’t seen in a while,” says Stu McLamb, peering through the front door of a Cary bar called Murph’s. He turns around and cocks his brow. “That OK?” Of course it is: On the night McLamb got arrested in Cary — essentially, the night before he began trying to figure out his life via The Love Language — his evening started at Murph’s. He’d met someone here for beers and then reconvened with a liquor bottle at a nearby house. After the band’s biggest show yet, is there anywhere else to be? McLamb had been coming here for years the night he got arrested. His first band played its first show here. Embarrassing photos in the women’s restroom offer the evidence. But it’s apparent tonight that he hasn’t been here often in the last several. As soon as he walks beneath the bar’s single sign — “PUB,” it reads, in those pale yellow letters often attached to the front of brick shopping centers, just like this one — and through the door,
he’s greeted by a chorus of familiarity and surprise. Four men in their 50s, all gathered around a pool table, look up and say hello. The bartender yells from his post. A woman named Crystal leaps from her perch on a stool against the wall that divides the bar’s two rooms. They hug, and she tells him that she’s already marked July 17 on her calendar. That’s the day The Love Language will play its CD release party for Libraries 30 miles away, in Carrboro. “We just played tonight, actually, down the street at the amphitheater,” McLamb offers, explaining that the band added the show at the last minute. “It was really fun.” Indeed, the last time The Love Language played the songs from Libraries locally, McLamb had no need to be nervous, whether or not it was in front of a few thousand people. The guitars moved perfectly between riffs and textures, and Thangs — ebullient and bright behind two keyboards — thickened each chorus. Rodermond’s bass lines were tough and coiled, while Jordan McLamb’s drumming bore all the perfectly emphatic qualities of someone playing an instrument that’s not their first choice. In the crowd, a handful of people sang along to songs that weren’t yet released. People stared at the band curiously, as though it were their first time hearing their neighbors. Most clapped politely. Some danced. Potential defeat, again, deferred to absolute victory. “Honestly, to make that first record again, I need to hit rock bottom again and have to fight my way back to the top. That’s a beautiful thing, but I don’t want to live my life as an artist setting myself up for disaster,” he says. “This record is a result of a lot of positive situations. Merge liked it. Our booking agent got us on the road. I had some break-ups, but I wanted to get away from thinking of myself as a tortured artist. Because I wasn’t.” And as if on cue from the director — happy and stable, at least for now, taking a swig from the night’s first Sierra Nevada — the lead riff of Collective Soul’s “Heaven Let Your Light Shine Down” blasts from Murph’s stereo. And, scene. shuf8
a tortured artist. Because I wasn’t.” –stu mclamb Left: Photo by Courtney Pierce/SXSW Center: Photo by Frank McMains Right: Photo by Frank McMains
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