- Photo by Jason Arthurs
- The Love Language
“Calm Down,” the pile-driving psych-pop single recently unveiled by The Love Language, is all restless energy. Its bass line lends beefy bulk to jittery syncopation, hurtling headlong with force that never relents. Near the end, it devolves into a dizzying dust-up, distorted riffs chasing each other around and around until they become indistinguishable from one another. All of this perfectly suits Stuart McLamb’s impassioned story about a dude stuck in a relationship that never lets him feel at ease.
It makes sense, then, that the video for the song—the first single from the forthcoming Ruby Red, The Love Language’s third LP—would be similarly restless. Filming is scheduled for 22 different locations, mostly scattered across Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Carrboro. One locale is the Chapel Hill rock club Local 506, and on Monday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the public is encouraged to come participate in a scene. The event is free.
“We are shooting at 22 locations, and we’re filming over three days,” McLamb explains. “It’s basically involving various monotonous earthly activities. It’s more metaphorical for someone out of sync with his surroundings. He eventually discovers that he can break-dance like a motherfucker, and he transcends his surroundings.”
McLamb wasn’t clear if that transcendent scene is the one being filmed at Local 506, but the Facebook event for the shoot does promise “a badass break dancer in an astronaut costume.” That sounds like something worth seeing.