The Love Language Libraries

I love this album. There's my objectivity then, shot through and diminished. This was my travel record. I didn't actually require a travel record this year. Last year, I needed, desperately, a travel record. The year before it was a Frida Hyvonen record. The weather outside my window has turned to Frida weather. The walk through the half empty terminal this year upon returning home felt different, instead of the willfully obscure it was tender exuberance. The Love Language is endowed with this marvelous spirt, an enthusiasm that is a really remarkable force acting upon my psyche. It impels motion. I listened while I sat next to mute airplane rowmates who misspelled react on their Ipod scrabble and when running in the South Carolina snowfall and along the beach that was truly deserted save for a few people taking photographs beneath the pier and a man running in shoes where his toes fit individually into each toe hole, and I listened alone but then music is always a lonely endeavour for me. 'Pedals" sounds like Stephen Cogle singing indiepop, it's a tremor of human consciousness. He's a crooner. He possesses a powerful croon, with power enough to knock over buildings in some rampage of emotion, it is a voice to crash brash cathedrals and to make the stars feel strangely close at home. I have never heard the first Love Language album. It is meant to be intimate and forlorn. I am not sure that was his calling and I would certainly not want to diminish his mien by calling him a sad sack troubadour without ambition. Maybe it is the producer but...this voice was meant for cataclysms and monuments. Stephen Cogle is honestly the closest approximation I can offer. But the Terminals? No, it does not sound like the Terminals. Not even when the Terminals wrote their gothic renditions of garage pop such as Frozen Car. The organ is prominent and soaring, the drums are thunderous, everything is to the red actually, it plays very loudly in my ears near to the point of distortion and dissonance but it wouldn't be as thrilling if it didn't seem on the verge of collapse. It is indiepop, I suppose but not in the epithetical sense of the word, the song just now, Brittany's Back has a country-ish twang to it but still his voice is as insistent as a steaming train. Incredible. This year the new year brings different emotions. Death shrouded my heart last year, from Seattle to home, sitting in an airplane waiting to see the end of an imaginary existence. There are diaries that provide the backing story and it is interesting to read about your imaginary existence in someone else's marvelous penmanship. This year my mouth has opened and words have come out. A rare feat. Track now is This Blood is Our Own, still incredible, the organ crescendo bit now is spine tingling, so many cliches, it seems as if when I really am impressed I lose my ability to express myself. There was once 'celestial braising', oh dear, and now it is 'marvelous' or 'incredible' or whatever. I forget who it was that said you should never use a cliche in writing ever, if you recognize any phrase as one that has existed in any prose or poetry anywhere then you must jettison this. But no one reads this, not especially since I have lost my heart when it comes to music and only occasionally have the flame stoked tepidly by majestic records such as this. I could look up the quotation I mean to impress you with but I was watching a show on Joe Strummer today and a cavalcade of unimpressive figures rolled out their own quotations and I was bored by them all even as I find Joe Strummer fascinating because the man was a genius in the sense that I think he knew exactly who he was and how he was meant to interact with the world. That is power. I am still unaware of what I mean to anyone or anything other than the first breath each morning. Summer Dust is on now, well actually it has just finished, more brilliance, a slowie, a country croon. Beautiful. Each track is a wonder. Blue Angel has started now and it sounds like some relic from a distant age. Again, perhaps these are all manipulations by a clever producer but the voice is no feat of science and labour. The words? Hmm...I suppose they are serviceable. Aside from the 'powdered cannons' bit in the first song nothing can move past the bombast of the performance. This is no slight. Perhaps it will take Gordon from ballboy to come along later with a stripped down acoustic recording with cello in tow to help me realize the brilliance of his pen apart from the magnificence of his voice. I am maybe overstating things. It's the heft of his voice, the musculature that impresses me so, it is actually a bit nasal but in this world of muffled mumblings it is a joy to hear a voice so distinct and prominent. Winter arrived only yesterday. Now to a jaunty, jangly number with rockabilly lyrics and back alley rubbish bin lid percussion and joy, armloads of joy. The first record was a lament. His girlfriend let him. His heart died. I may have been more open to that last year. My heart didn't die, it was paralyzed. New Year's eve is the saddest night of the year. A retelling, nay an audit of 12 months of regret and wasted opportunities can make for a weary evening spent alone in the dark writing about sunny pop music. Anthophobia now, marvelous. I can't tell you if the songs are great, perhaps not, I've sen other reviews and they are occasionally tepid but his performance is inspiring. When I recount the highlights of this year I think only of one night when I discovered I might mean something to someone sometime. When someone proposes to you there is that brief glimpse into a possible future and it doesn't seem horrible. But when you say no, there isn't a possibility of recovery. I could play The Love Language the next time, if ever there is a next time. But fear of being alone isn't enough. Next track, Horophones, loud and dissonant and still sooooo good. I find that when there are long absences I tend to describe my past recollections only vaguely too timid to reveal anything other than my visceral reactions instead of a logical examination of all that lead to my demise because it is a loop that I have grown tiresome of. I could make a resolution to change editors but at this point it may be genetics. And a bad haircut, I have the world's second worst haircut, second only to some person from the Joe Strummer documentary. Wilmont, starts off as a tender distantly recorded lament and now has bloomed into a glamourous ballad. Is this the album of the year? Possibly. I tend to discover albums of the year always in December. The most played record of my year is perhaps a toss-up between the Lucky Soul album which dominated the early part of the year, the Club 8 record which I thin is completely genius however unlikely that sounds and Sally Seltmann. I think record of the year comes down to this and Sally Seltmann. Sally Seltmann touches my hart with her joy, my heart is steamrolled by the truckloads of joy here.