Low: Classic or classic?

we're gonna have to repoll the albums after the new one has been out a while

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Friday, 14 September 2018 03:25

They're only a few away on the artists polls, which I know because I'm down to do it.

Because of this album I think it's worth deferring for a few months so it sinks in properly (despite me suggesting it three years ago or something).

Of course now it's come round I'm not actually sure I've got time to run it ...

re "getting into Low" I bought I Could Live In Hope second hand sometime around 99ish having never heard anything by them, liked it OK (esp Words) but wasn't blown away. Then I briefly went out with someone in 2000 who was a big fan and used to play Long Division when I was round hers, I downloaded Things We Lost In The Fire off Audiogalaxy then 2003 got together with my wife who was also a big Low fan and our first proper date was a Low gig in London. We've seen them a few times since then but tbh we kinda lost interest with C'mon. I only v recently listened to the albums after that. Ones and Sixes is really good so I told my wife we need to listen to the new one because everyone is raving about it.

Great post pgwp, thanks.

The Kranky era was when I first discovered them (I think I was led to them by Mogwai/Stuart Braithwaite championing them very heavily in interviews) and Things We Lost In The Fire is probably my long running personal favourite. I remember getting Alan to sign my CD of it after a gig a good few years ago and he was so gracious and lovely about my typically dorky exaltations.

I am a terminal dilettante and so only have a spotty knowledge of their catalogue. I do find a little Low goes a long way but, fwiw, Secret Name is 'the one' for me. I find it devastating. I've seen them live once - at Green Man on a humid, overcast afternoon with a massive storm brewing over the black hills, a storm that never quite arrived. They were mesmerising.

This album kills.

kind of annoyed that the P-fork review leans hard on the "timely" angle

^ kind of inevitable given the band's own rhetoric around the album?

I've been slowly seduced by the singles leading up to this and love the fragmented nature of it. Is there something vaguely unsettling about the 'feed this into the Burton studio and seeing what comes out' narrative (as spun in the P4K review, but they're hardly going to be the only ones)?

Always Trying to Work it Out is fantastic.

wasn't aware of the rhetoric, is there a relevant interview kicking around?

That recent Wire interview is pretty explicit in that regard (anti-Trump despair) - albeit, from memory, I don't know that the link is quite as direct as implied in the P4K review.

The Guardian review (which is a rave 5*****, "album of the year" one) heavily features the timeliness/state of the world angle as well.

At any rate, I'm pleased that it's being so well-received.

When I saw them live in Leeds over the summer Alan made clear his frustrations with the current political situation in the US.

Drums & Guns cycle was similarly “political,” insofar as Low gets political. Both albums do a good job of capturing a certain mental instability as a result of the awfulness perpetrated in the name of the US, without being strident or framed as protest songs.

good album, "tempest" and "always trying to work it out" are amazing; honestly though a lot of the "crazy production" sounds like kid a/amnesiac

if every track were "like spinning plates" sure

Well, anyway, got my ticket their show here in March, that'll do.

a propos of nothing, the only explicit reference to Low in popular music that I know of is still from the song Minneapolis by that dog.

How about getting covered multiple times by Robert Plant!

Not to get all Low-nerdy, but when did Alan switch to tuning (iirc) almost exclusively to open G? I could have sworn that was a thing, and that it affected the direction of his songs.

Listening to Ones and Sixes right now and yeah, don't know why I didn't listen to this one more the first time around!

Hmm, maybe he's been using open g all along? If that's true that's super cool.

I believe so

This felt timely to me more in the sense that the sonic approach felt like a brilliantly contemporary advancement on their characteristic themes and methods. Low have a long-standing interest in noise and quietness (not silence, quietness; more ambiguous, no neat gesture towards the abstract). Pgwp’s breakdown upthread describes those Kranky albums exactly (muffled edges, vocals veering off-harmony, that nagging feeling....). When they turned up the volume on Drums and Guns it had the same effect, still that same sense of straining to hear, voices on the edge of hearing. This album feels like a push forward and and brilliant resolution of that paradox. The way voices are obliterated by absent noises and drums; noise and silence are resolved into one thing. That first harmony you hear on Quorum, where the empty space of that characteristic snare instead gouges hollows out of their voice. Like that air-raid sheet of guitar that blares out over the vocals on Breaker it sets a similar precedent for how noise is now a strategy for effecting that same shellshocked ("giant Xs on yr eyes") shattered sense of their voices as human, vulnerable, receding, only this time the noise is strangely a kind of silence. They sound like they're gasping for air.

this album has REALLY resonated with me.

Their songwriting feels drone-based and minimal and sort of electronic or uncanny even when they're playing acoustic. Which I think is why my partner doesn't connect with them, when I was like "hey, here's an indie song-based band that I like!" and she's like "but they're not, really". And also why this new one doesn't feel like a radical re-invention to me, just another version of Low.

yeah, i think that's what people are generally saying here

Just listened today. This album is absolute bonkers

It does sound like Fennesz to me... I assume most of the drones are actually guitars being sent to digital hell so it’s not a bad comparison.

a lot of Oval too.

also Ekkehard Ehlers, I guess (whatever happened to him?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8RRy8AIuGk

OwL remix Low from 1998 should get a mention too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8IHnd_KF9o

Pretty sure Sparhawk plays open G. Or at least learning reading chord progressions of their songs introduced me to it.

Their covers of "I Started A Joke" and "Lord Can You Hear Me" both feel like guilty pleasures but I've worn them both out

I'll just keep posting this because I have the feeling lots of people loving 'Double Negative' won't have heard a fairly obscure (UK-only?) EP from 2000. But it's definitely the work that firmly cemented my love of Low back at the time, and made me hope for (but not be surprised by) an album like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRoIbBbJx4U

Definitely not UK only. When it came out I just thought of that EP as a novelty, since Low collaborating with Spring Heel Jack was, at least on paper, as random as them touring with Soul Coughing, even if the SHJ collar worked out.

I would've thought it a novelty, too, based on Spring Heel Jack's work to that point. But the marriage works so perfectly, and it suggested more fully than anything else to that point that Alan and Mimi's melodic and lyrical sensibilities could be served wonderfully by music that wasn't just guitar/bass/tiny drum kit (much as I loved that formula for them, too).

Y'all made me listen to Low for the first time since, I think, Things We Lost in the Fire. This seems way more promising than I would have guessed!

Best Low collab of all time is this one:

https://youtu.be/YlU8hY_xOYs

Feat transient waves and piano magic. ImI

^^yeah that's a beaut

Anyone who hasn’t heard Low in a long time should check out the pair of Low covers Robert Plant included on his Band of Joy album, they’re extremely good.

listened to Drums and Guns and I like it a lot, I love the sound palette of drones & shambolic drum loops layered over each other, except for when the vocals are hard-panned which is something I really dislike. all the other panning is very cool but having vocals or other leads hard-panned just makes it feel very unbalanced listening on headphones

yeah, to this day i have never had the opportunity to listen to drums and guns through speakers at a loud volume, as i'm sure was intended. listening to it on headphones is uncomfortable because of the panning. it sounds good at a moderate volume but i'd love to just crank it the way you can with headphones.

The more I listen to it the more I think that maybe I never listened to "Ones and Sixes?" Because I've been listening to it a lot the last few days, more than the new one (for now), and I love everything about it.

When did low become a £30 concert ticket band? I'm sure the last time they were here it was around half that.

Demand? My ticket over here was only $20, plus $7 for service charges.

of course, demand-pull inflation but I'm not entirely sure that justifies the sharp hike. I want them to be paid well, of course (musicians get little enough recompense these days) and I can afford it but i do balk at it a little. it's entirely possible that they are doing something that makes this a particularly expensive thing to get on the road but i was surprised at the cost.

let's just blame brexit and go see Low.

That's a great LCD Soundsystem remix.

:)

i am really loving Double Negative, it's evoking very strongly imagery for me of tides drifting in and out on a remote beach, with the occasional wave crashing

feels more like a drone album that happens to contain fragments of songs in it rather than the other way around - with the way the tracks flow into each other it really feels like one continuous piece

just listened to it. bits were nice but it didn't leave much impression. might give it another go, maybe it's like a magic eye painting