Martin Creed

Love To You is the debut album by Martin Creed, the Scottish artist who won the Turner Prize in 2001. He has been writing and performing songs alongside his visual work since the 1990s. Released in 2012 on Telephone Records with Moshi Moshi, and pressed on vinyl by The Vinyl Factory, it collects eighteen songs about love and hate in under forty minutes. Some songs are a few seconds long, others last four minutes, and the shortest are little more than a sound. It opens with Ooh and closes with Aah, which is a fair summary of how literal Creed is prepared to be. One song had a life in his art before it reached the album: What's The Point Of It? had already served as the soundtrack to a seventy-minute piece built on ballet positions.

The record was produced and mixed by David Cunningham with Creed, and played by a small band that includes Keiko Owada, with the Ex Cathedra choir appearing on the credits. The sound is plain on purpose: clean guitar, bass, drums and Creed's Glaswegian voice, with female harmonies on top. 1234 makes a song out of a count-in, and Alphabet rushes breathlessly through the letters. Words is built almost entirely on the single word of its title, while Fuck Off repeats its one phrase for about a minute. Against these jokes sit the record's simplest love songs, the title track and You're The One For Me, both just over four minutes. Reviewing it in 2012, Drowned in Sound heard a sequence of lo-fi, post-punk vignettes, placed it near The Vaselines and The Wave Pictures, and praised Creed's "clear eye for a catchy tune". Exclaim was cooler the same year, finding that the album "screams 'art school'". Both reviews landed on the same tension between concept and song, and the record lives exactly there. The band also played these songs live, and Drowned in Sound noted that they were a lot of fun on stage.

LP pressed on 180g heavyweight vinyl on The Vinyl Factory's EMI 1400 press, with a full-colour inner sleeve and an oversized poster of the cover image.