Libraries

The Love Language is a fortunate by-product of frontman North Carolina native Stuart McLamb'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. On sophomore effort Libraries, the equilibrium of frontman McLamb's madness and producer BJ Burton's discipline has rendered an album in the classic sense, in which no song is expendable and no passage is without purpose. Libraries captures 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.