The Love Language
Baby Grand
Release Date: Aug 3, 2018
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Indie Rock, Indie Pop
Record label: Merge
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Album Review: Baby Grand by The Love Language
Very Good, Based on 2 Critics
Based on rating 7.3/10
It wasn't obvious, before the release of Baby Grand, that the Love Language needed to find a new direction. Over the last nine years, Stuart McLamb and a rotating set of musicians brought his lovely, vulnerable songwriting to life with equal parts subtlety and sincerity. They could get loud (see: their charmingly noisy 2009 self-titled debut and "Calm Down" from 2013's Ruby Red), but a certain lightning-bug placidity was their main mood, with lush horns and peach-sweet melodies that went down easy.
Based on rating 7.2/10
As The Love Language, Stuart McLamb strengths have always been his knack for production and penchant for heartache--mixing and matching genres for his grand, indie-pop arrangements. An album of reflection, Baby Grand is no different, with McLamb using a breakup and a move west as the jumping off points for his latest offering of songs. The album opens with rumbling distortion and an explosion of frenetic euphoria, as "Frames" drops you right into McLamb's signature bulldozer-of-sound production style; the cascading glockenspiel-like noises and crashing drums introducing us to McLamb's first goodbye: "She's gone back to the city / She's gone half the world away.
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