Too LOW: ILM Artist Poll #111 - Low - RESULTS

Again. Expected this really high. Great track. This poll is weird.

This was the first of their songs where I got Neil Young vibes.

love Dinosaur Act

https://i.imgur.com/4AJOMWJ.png
17. Hey
Released on HEY WHAT (2021)
461 points, 15 voters
Studio version

heyyyyyyyyyy

this is the only song from hey what that made my ballot. rest of the album still feels too new, but “hey”… first time i heard it i thought it was the best song ever

https://i.imgur.com/BjC9Scg.png
16. Pissing
Released on The Great Destroyer (2005)
479 points, 16 voters
Studio version
Live from the Fitzgerald Theater 2018

does it make sense to stop here for today with thanksgiving and everythin? i can do another 5 if people want but i think it makes more sense to do the top 15 tomorrow?

the studio version of "pissing" is good but doesn't really compare to how immense the live versions are

Sounds good!

15 tomorrow is good!

The first three words of Starfire sound like Alan's about to sing "They call him Flipper, Flipper, Flipper the dolphin."

starfire was my #1 - too low!

Friday is also a holiday in the US but I hope we can get some people to check in for the final 15

"Coattails" is so simply constructed: a single one-note vocal line under a repeated arpeggio, bookended by a trudging riff. Amazing what they turn that into

"Fly" was my #1. Love everything about it: the mood they spin, the electronic touches, the haunting melody line and lyrics. everything I want from this band!

"Pissing" never stood out for me on Great Destroyer, maybe because it follows "Broadway". but I'm listening back now and realizing this song is way better than I gave it credit for

It's their best song about pissing!

Overall, revisiting their oeuvre in full these last weeks has really just hit home how excellent even all the tracks I didn't register over the years as "favorites" really are excellent (things like "Pissing" as an example prompting the thought).

'C'mon,' 'Invisible Way,' and 'Ones & Sixes' still don't really hit me like 10 or so other albums... But they're at worst "good" even so. Made me realize I like 'The Great Destroyer' much more than I did at the time--I think at the time I was hoping for more "weird" Low (which I got in spades on the next album), and I was disappointed by the guitar-god-ness of it, but now I hear it as a cohesive collection of really stellar songs, produced in a way I wouldn't want ever song to be, but that was well warranted.

I'd easily say they're my favorite "rock" band of my lifetime, more consistently great than Radiohead (probably the only other rock band that's kept my attention over all these years).

From #61-#36, there have been 13 songs which received a #1 vote, which appeared on 10 different releases.

Weirdly, the only record to have multiple songs receive #1 votes so far is Secret Name, which has 4 or 5 of them (depending on whether the #1 voter for "Will the Night" specifically intended the Dead Pilot version)

i know no one needs to read this in the low poll thread but i've been revisiting as well and i'm even more convinced they have nothing to offer me any more. i was into them when i was a very confused person, and i can't unhear that confusion when i listen to them now, even in the newer stuff. the tension i hear in everything they've made between darkness and light feels completely unnecessary to me now, like a massive dead end. it becomes more pronounced after 2002. it doesn't help that i generally don't find their lyrics convincing at all (they do a lot of hedging imo). the earlier stuff has an appealing innocence or open-heartedness to it that i don't hear in the later work. but anyway, that's all i can give them, even though from a distance i appreciate how gifted they are and what they were able to do with it. although even that i feel the need to qualify somehow. signed, a low fan no longer.

The tension is unnecessary in the grand scheme of things

...but essential to their music. Think of them like a really good crime novelist or something.

That tension seems essential to... the human condition?

Curious--in what ways were you confused, now enlightened, that that struggle within Low (or humanity) holds no appeal?

not a good faith question, i'm done in this thread

I was genuinely curious what made that tension hold no appeal, as it seems fundamental to life itself (as opposed to say depression or hard times, both of which I know personally). But as you wish.

I also ask having created a two-part "introduction to Low" mix some while back called 'A Light in Darkness' specifically themed around that duality and tension, which I find not only compelling but necessary. So you're wrong ti say I ask how you changed such that that part of Low and their art became superflouous at best and a cause to entirely dismiss them at worst.

I'm not a huge lyrics parser (despite of or perhaps because of having a literature degree) but it seems to me few lyricists are as forthrightly expressing their own experience and struggles as Alan and Mimi. Whether those lyrics are brilliant is an argument to be had I guess--to me they play their role in the overall music aptly and sometimes with great pithy beauty. But "hedged" (as opposed to, say, "struggling" or "searching" or rife with longing, anger, sometimes hope) seems a vast oversimplification and a mischaracterization.

"Wrong to say I ask in bad faith..." that is.

Low has some of the best lyrics-in-the-interrogative imo. At one point a few years ago I tried to make a playlist of them all (naturally titled "What Part of Me") but I'm sure I missed some.

Always Trying To Work It Out, Quorum, and Dinosaur Act were in my top ten.

Always ... is an oasis of relative calm and basic human emotion among the chaos of DN, although it's the queasy, drunk vocal effects that make the track what it is.

I meant to vote for Pissing, I discovered I'd left it off my ballot after submitting it, totally inexcusable.

It's their best song about pissing!

― cwkiii, Friday, November 26, 2021 bookmarkflaglink

I actually prefer “Plastic Cup”!

I have to be honest, I've never really gelled with Starfire.

it's not at all bad but it's pretty far from my favourite side of theirs

Coattails and The Plan are top five, often number ones for me depending on my mood. When I write that it blows my mind that people like songs like "Always" better than "The Plan," it's because it does. Almost every single person I know irl agrees with me, it's only on this board that people slobber over "Low with cool effects," which is honestly the way that I think of the later records.

The early stuff is better.

imagine writing a song about your mate who runs a pirate radio station out the back of an ambulance. it doesn't get better.

xp I kinda feel like a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album (Non-Classical) is a form of slobbering, so it's definitely not just this board!

table, you like techno. Dismissing something as "Low with cool effects" is kinda beneath you?

Low *is* a cool effect, and has been from the start.

Cool effects is all there is from top to bottom

Who is saying "Always" is better than "The Plan"? Certainly not the poll results. And it seems like there will be plenty of early Low in the top 15, maybe even an early fan favorite that's basically all "cool effects."

I don't see "Low with cool effects" as a negative! (and I had "Always..." higher than "The Plan" on my ballot)

I don’t expect it to place at this point, but I love the simplicity of “What Part of Me.” It’s like they dusted off an old Elvis number and made it their own.

“what part of me” is the best song ever. cut from my ballot at the last minute

all i want to say about this early v. late low business is that if these guys had made 13 albums that all sounded like “curtain” (which was my #1 album vote tho it was truly neck and neck with DN), i’d have lost interest in them years ago

Indeed!

Btw I don't know if this has been talked about but all the lockdown instagram concerts have been compiled here: http://itsfridayiminlow.com/ Pretty cool!

"all i want to say about this early v. late low business is that if these guys had made 13 albums that all sounded like “curtain” (which was my #1 album vote tho it was truly neck and neck with DN), i’d have lost interest in them years ago"

Not only that, but whichever hardcore fans were left caring after 13 albums and 25 years of the same thing would *still* be favouring the "early stuff", and stacking their ballots with songs from the first five albums, making for a fairly boring and predictable poll.

In 1969, shortly after In A Silent Way’s release, Davis was relaxing on the patio of his New York brownstone when an elderly man called the trumpeter over. “Miles Davis, I love that music of yours” he said, “but I don’t like that new shit you’re into.” Miles turned to him, and tersely replied, “Well shall I wait for you, motherfucker?”

Feels appropriate for Low.

Do strings count as "cool effects"? Because I love "Closer" and I hope to see it place in the top 15 today

In 1969, shortly after In A Silent Way’s release, Davis was relaxing on the patio of his New York brownstone when an elderly man called the trumpeter over. “Miles Davis, I love that music of yours” he said, “but I don’t like that new shit you’re into.” Miles turned to him, and tersely replied, “Well shall I wait for you, motherfucker?”

Feels appropriate for Low.

― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Friday, November 26, 2021 9:18 AM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

How about "I'm not totally impressed by a band using tools that electronic musicians and others have been using for years"

Some of the songs are great, some of them are embarrassing (imho), and framing it as some sort of Ludditism is wrong-headed.

I have a deep emotional attachment to the early records, and that bias isn't really going to be shaken by the new ones, despite my appreciation for them.

i love both eras (very early and very recent), and some of the others in between. in the same way that table has a deep emotional attachment to the old ones, a new listener could very well have an even deeper emotional attachment to the new ones, while never quite feeling what's so special about the old ones.

i don't know, funny to think to say on a board full of paid and unpaid critics, on a thread about ranking inherently subjective things in an objective fashion, but it makes no sense to me to ever try to objectively rank things that are inherently subjective. it's a fun exercise to see where it all lands though

it's like ranking colors and then disagreeing about what someone picked