Love Is All "Two Thousand And Ten Injuries" LP (2010)
Love Is All "Two Thousand And Ten Injuries" LP (2010)
Love Is All "Two Thousand And Ten Injuries" LP (2010)
Love Is All "Two Thousand And Ten Injuries" LP (2010)
Love Is All "Two Thousand And Ten Injuries" LP (2010)
What's Your Rupture?

Love Is All "Two Thousand And Ten Injuries" LP (2010)

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Details: The is a near-mint used copy of Love Is All's final album, "Two Thousand And Ten Injuries" (2010) released on Polyvinyl Records in the US. It comes with an insert and is the plain black vinyl variant.

Description: "Disco beats, post-punk sax honking, twee-pop boy/girl harmonies, and lyrics that rip your heart out. Yep, Love Is All is back.

Two Thousand and Ten Injuries buzzes with joy. Hardly surprising, since Love Is All are one of the era's great punk bands. But wait: Should you really use the word "punk" to describe a band with such obvious ambitions beyond the guitar/bass/drums baseline? Because if you've heard Love Is All, you know they're hardly formalists: disco beats, post-punk sax honking, twee-pop boy-girl harmonies. They've got a definite sound, but within its boundaries they're thrillingly unconstrained.

Listen past the kitchen-sink sonic clutter, though, and Two Thousand and Ten Injuries could have wooed the same teen rabble as Sam the Sham and the Trashmen. After all, the garage and psych bands of the Nuggets-era also played ham-handed organs and saxes, and pounded their way through ethnic percussion and a hundred variations on the Bo Diddley beat. And nobody would describe them as post-punk. Take TTaTI opener "Bigger Bolder", with its learn-in-a-minute melody and reverb-ragged "bad" production. It's the kind of fuzzy, bouncy racket you could imagine blaring from jukeboxes in the early 1960s.

But then there are the lyrics. It's the lyrics that separate Love Is All from those garage rock pioneers and really connect them to the late-70s DIY explosion. Love Is All singer Josephine Olausson is one of the early 21st century's great poets of romantic dissatisfaction, and like the ladies of the Slits, the Raincoats, and the Delta 5, her take on bad romance is deeply personal, beyond post-punk pastiche. Her kiddie yelp, with its innate cuddliness when she goes soft and conversational, can sound like a precocious grade-schooler obsessed with her mom's copy of Wanna Buy a Bridge?. But the sugary cuteness is a smokescreen, hiding the kind of scalpel-edged self-examination most of us like to avoid at all costs.

Pay attention, and certain lines all but draw blood with their plain-spoken pain: "I know I was acting a fool/ I remember you calling me cruel/ Well that was ages ago/ Oh how I wish I could prove how I've grown." In Olausson's world, there are no predators and no victims. Just human beings, emotional fuck-ups trying to do a little better this time out, capable of life-changing kindness and casual cruelty in the same 12-month span. And accordingly, given Love Is All's mix of the unflinching and the playful, no one's left off the hook. Olausson knows that when a relationship cracks up, both parties are often to blame, and that failure was always a possibility. And still we try again, if only because it beats the alternative.

That kind of romantic realism, however witty or self-deprecating or full of non-sentimental pathos, makes Olausson's vulnerable moments all the more unexpected, and all the more effective as emotional sucker-punches. When she shouts, "I want my head resting on a lap," on "A Side in a Bed"-- over the kind of lovesick new wave worthy of a John Hughes climax-- you know she's lived enough to know the sacrifices behind the fantasy the music both celebrates and subverts. You could say Olausson's subject is narrow. But it's the only thing that matters. Even if we're wised-up, grown up, and made a little (or a lot) cynical by life, don't we all want our heads resting on a lap?" --Jess Harvell, Pitchfork

Grade: NM (Cover) / NM (Record)

TRACK LISTING SIDE A:

A1. Bigger Bolder
A2. Repetition
A3. Never Now
A4. Less Than Thrilled
A5. Early Warnings
A6. False Pretense

TRACK LISTING SIDE B:

B1. The Birds Were Singing With All Their Might
B2. Again, Again
B3. Kungen
B4. A Side In A Bed
B5. Dust
B6. Take Your Time