The Ladybug Transistor's beloved album The Albemarle Sound turns 25 this year, and to celebrate the occasion, a 25h Anniversary Expanded Edition will be released on November 8, by HHBTM Records. In addition, the band — Gary Olson, Jeff Baron, Jennifer Baron, Sasha Bell, and Julia Rydholm — will tour in December.

Originally released in 1999 on Merge Records, The Albemarle Sound, the third full-length LP by Brooklyn, New York’s The Ladybug Transistor, exists just outside its fixed point in time and space. Perhaps the last great pop album of the 20th century, The Albemarle Sound is like few records from the turn of the millennium, its attention turned to the intricate arrangements of late 1960s pop and the strange and familiar environs of home. 

The notion of home is important to The Albemarle Sound, not just lyrically and thematically, but in the fact that the album was recorded, mixed and produced in a Victorian house in Flatbush named Marlborough Farms. The Ladybug Transistor was formed in 1995 as the home recording project of singer and trumpeter Gary Olson, and by 1999 the group had swelled to include siblings Jeff Baron (guitar) and Jennifer Baron (bass), Sasha Bell (keyboards and flute), San Fadyl (drums), and Julia Rydholm (violin), who lived together at Marlborough Farms,  a home filled with instruments, recording equipment and a piano room where the group made demos.

“The instruments and recording equipment around the studio seemed to have stories that were woven into the fabric of the house or its prior inhabitants,” recalls Jennifer, the sense of history and community evident in the warmth of The Albemarle Sound. Recorded entirely analog on a 16-track machine, the album invites the listener in by invoking place with an impressionist’s attention to detail and a surrealist’s curiosity. Moments at Sheepshead Bay and Prospect Park are transfigured in the light through the windshield of a car as tears are transubstantiated into summer rain and canals take the place of asphalt streets.

Musically, these scenes are given voice by Olson’s rich baritone and animated by arrangements that meld elements of the kind of baroque, orchestral pop practiced by Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach with the sweeping cinematic vistas of Luis Bacalov, imbuing their surroundings with California sunshine and an occasional bit of western swagger. Each of The Albemarle Sound’s 12 songs are soundscapes unto themselves, entire neighborhoods built by the careful employment of voice and instruments, every part exquisitely placed to prick the ear and pull the heartstrings at just the right time. 

This fall, The Ladybug Transistor will embark on a tour in celebration of the 25th anniversary of “The Albemarle Sound,” supported by Slumberland artists Lightheaded on the East Coast and Tony Molina on the West Coast.

The Ladybug Transistor on tour: 
Dec 04 Medford, MA – Deep Cuts
Dec 05 Keene, NH – Nova Arts
Dec 06 Kingston, NY – Tubby's
Dec 07 Brooklyn, NY – Public Records
Dec 09 Seattle, WA – Madame Lou's
Dec 10 Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios
Dec 12 San Francisco, CA – Rickshaw Stop
Dec 13 Los Angeles, CA – Lodge Room