I suppose I’d descibe this as a very, very old school sunshine pop album which has been recorded through a blanket of fuzz.  In fact, this sound has been achieved by capturing the music on a four-track before it was handed over to anything at all computerised, retaining that trademark growly sound, particularly on the vocals, which I am so fond of at the moment.

If I had a criticism of the album at all it would be that it is slightly downbeat for just a little too much of the time.  The problem with writing a stand-out hit like Lalita is that, when it is in pretty stark contrast to the rest of the album in terms of energy and atmosphere, you can end up wrong-footing your audience somewhat.  I spent the first listen waiting for the band to go mental again, and they don’t.

Once you realise that the album is more brooding than you’d thought, perhaps a little more gentle, then you can start to appreciate it for what it actually is: a splendidly crackly perversion of something that was supposed to be innocent and sincere.  They’ve taken something nice, and broken it slightly.

I can’t really deal with genuinely carefree pop most of the time, and the fact that The Love Language have knocked the corners off it slightly puts this right into my kind of territory.  Really good.

The Love Language – Lalita

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The Love Language – Manteo

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It can be a little difficult to interview a band in the absence of the main songwriter, so certain questions about the slightly arcane, grotesque nature of the subject matter can’t really be put. Other rather brilliant ones can, though.

Like how on Earth the band ended up guerilla gigging the lines for other people’s shows early in their days. Apparently they’d just rock up to group of people queueing to get into a gig and play for them, and when I ask them about it they just shrug it off.

“We’d been practising for a while and we didn’t have any shows booked, so we thought ‘we wish we were playing this show’ so we would crash the show. And when there’s tons of people standing in line for a show, they’re already there for music and you can see what kind of a response you would get.”

I can’t quite imagine that sort of habit working very well in the drizzle of Scotland, but The Builders & the Butchers seems to have a pretty relaxed attitude to what constitutes a performance. The fourth wall barely seems to be there at all.

“We ended up playing on the street a lot in downtown Portland. Mostly just practising, we were just kind of playing, seeing what would happen with it.” Read the rest of this entry »