Low: Classic or classic?

Went to both Square Lake shows. Really amazing how their vocals sound just as good live as they do on record. I like pretty much every song on the new LP — it’s rare that a band is putting out some of their best work 30 years into their career

even after double negative i can barely believe they put out a song like "hey"

Yeah that's the song of the album for me. I mean, a very strong album overall, but that song's in a different stratosphere

yeah “hey” is the one that stopped me in my tracks when listening to the album

"Ones and Sixes," I think that came out when I was (stupidly) at my most Low ambivalent, where I somehow still hadn't quite processed their genius. Probably the album that came before it didn't help, honestly.

Although the common sentiment at the time was that Ones & Sixes was an improvement over Invisible Way, I nevertheless feel that Ones & Sixes earned a big reassessment after Double Negative came out.

So I listened to the new one for the first time today. My kneejerk reaction was that it was great but also hard to compete with the revelation of Double Negative. A few tracks knocked me out instantly—“Hey” is a massive peak in the middle of the record; “Don’t Walk Away” is like a throwback to more traditional Low but it rises so gloriously out of the rest of the album. Still, I felt that a lot of the album was keeping me at arm’s length.

And then, wow, “The Price You Pay.” Might be the best closing track on any Low album. I want to see this band playing in an arena.

Well I sat down after it was over, turned on a baseball game on mute and started idly reading through this thread, and started the album over again without much thought. The second time through just feels astounding. It’s weird, like I was trying so hard to focus on it the first time through and somehow missed so much, and then I just let it play and all of its greatness shook me. I’m kinda stunned by this album.

I wasn't totally sold on the singles TBH, after the one-two punch of Ones & Sixes and Double Negative - the latter is devastatingly wonderful.
But I'm listening to Hey What now and oh boy those first two tracks and the segue between them is phenomenal.

I listened back to a stack of Low in preparation for this, and I have to say it was interesting hearing the Porter Ricks remix of "Down" again. What a stunner.
Nothing about the last 3 albums should be at all surprising to long-term Low fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8IHnd_KF9o
In my typically backwards way I was into the owL Remix album before I was across much of Low's actual output...

Updated my dual cross-oeuvre Low comps for 'Hey What'. They're not "best ofs" per se--rather, mixes taking at max one track per album/EP, in chronological order, that I think would introduce a new listener effectively or illustrate the band's constant exploration. Focus is via the duality at their core, the light and the darkness.

.@lowtheband has been one of my very favorite bands for 25 years. They always create intense beauty from the struggle between light and darkness in our souls.

'A Light in Darkness' is how I would introduce someone to Low. With 'HEY WHAT,' light and dark join into something new. pic.twitter.com/FvepXGVeqG

— Musicophilia (@musicophiliamix) September 12, 2021

https://archive.org/details/low2017-10-16.amsterdam.ca-14.flac16/low.2017-10-16.ca-14.mastered.t02.flac

have been looking through bootlegs today & found this great one from the 'organ reframed' festival in 2017 where they performed mostly early versions of double negative songs arranged for pipe organ & drum machine

the song titles are mostly different though:
"horse breaker" is "rome (always in the dark)"
"it's all been done" is the double negative outtake which was a japanese bonus track
"dancing" is "dancing and blood"
"blood" is "quorum"
"what's the world" is an unreleased song they've only played once since, for one of last year's instagram performances
"interlude" is "the son, the sun"? i think?
"soldier" is "fly"
"i've had it all" is another unreleased song

"Ones and Sixes," I think that came out when I was (stupidly) at my most Low ambivalent, where I somehow still hadn't quite processed their genius. Probably the album that came before it didn't help, honestly.

Although the common sentiment at the time was that Ones & Sixes was an improvement over Invisible Way, I nevertheless feel that Ones & Sixes earned a big reassessment after Double Negative came out.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Sunday, 12 September 2021 21:44 (yesterday) link

Absolutely. The general indie-verse was overlooking it as I think there was an assumption that Low had at that point settled, as many veteran indie bands do, into a solid but not-so-daring version of themselves that nobody was really inclined to get particularly excited about. Another indie band playing indie music. Their recent albums were cheap in the used bins, and their cool stock was Low. Double Negative was such a fresh sound that it instantly flipped their brand perception to "innovative geniuses" and their whole discography gets reassessed in the process.

I feel very lucky that I just happened to be getting into Low around the time Ones and Sixes came out. I started with the Transmission EP (bc it's my favorite Joy Division song), continued to contemporary LP Long Division, then went "These guys never broke up, right? I wonder what they're up to these days..." and proceeded to have my mind blown

i am so happy low are on top of the world right now.

I wasn't to into it as a single, but in the context of the album, "Days Like These" hits much harder. Been humming it all weekend, too.

ugh, *too into it, jeezus.

I listened to Invisible Way over the weekend, and I still like it. 'On My Own', vamping out on "happy birthday happy birthday happy birthday happy birthday", come on, who else would do that. I'm glad that exists in addition to the distortionverse of the last few albums.

here's my video of the first two songs "white horses" & "i can't wait" (they did the the new album in its entirety the a set of older songs)

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

sorry about the baseball hat head! i tried to hold it as high as i could without being the asshole who is holding up a phone so the people in back of me couldn't see

here are a few pictures of the site to give a better idea of what it looked like/the vibe

https://i.postimg.cc/c6hzZNJ1/PXL-20210911-234000026-MP.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/yDgpFgyW/PXL-20210912-004136518-MP.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/ZCDDBF31/PXL-20210912-012705775-NIGHT.jpg

Thanks for posting this! I won't get a chance to see them again until April.

xpost that owL remix of Down is excellent and does connect to the evolution of their sound

https://archive.org/details/low2017-10-16.amsterdam.ca-14.flac16/low.2017-10-16.ca-14.mastered.t02.flac🕸

have been looking through bootlegs today & found this great one from the 'organ reframed' festival in 2017 where they performed mostly early versions of double negative songs arranged for pipe organ & drum machine

the song titles are mostly different though:
"horse breaker" is "rome (always in the dark)"
"it's all been done" is the double negative outtake which was a japanese bonus track
"dancing" is "dancing and blood"
"blood" is "quorum"
"what's the world" is an unreleased song they've only played once since, for one of last year's instagram performances
"interlude" is "the son, the sun"? i think?
"soldier" is "fly"
"i've had it all" is another unreleased song

Mad at myself for ignoring these guys for 25 years. Glad to have loved the singles and bought this album last Friday.

I wasn't too into it as a single, but in the context of the album, "Days Like These" hits much harder. Been humming it all weekend, too.

― I'm a sovereign jazz citizen (the table is the table), Monday, September 13, 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Same

I was saying to Brad that the structure of the album reminds me a bit of The Comsat Angels' Sleep No More, wherein the first half kind of spirals inward in a manner that feels really of a piece, then the album comes up for the air a bit in the second half (before an epic closer). The clarity of the melody in "Days Like These", in isolation, felt like a comment on their recent career in general (sort of like C'mon refracted through the production values of Double Negative) whereas in the context of the album it feels more like a comment on the songs that precede it, like, "well, this is where we are now".

Will have to go back to Ones and Sixes. Have been listening to this repeatedly on headphones . Right now am focused on the last three - Don’t Walk Away, More, and The Price You Pay, all amazing

I liked what Abi Bliss said in The Wire: “In the same way that Double Negative was a Trump record that never once named the former president, the pandemic that few saw coming is lyrically absent from HEY WHAT yet omnipresent. It’s there in the shifts between fight or flight eruptions and quieter moments of hallucinatory disconnection, in the dramas played out upon a contracted stage of ‘I’s and ‘you’s, and in the renewed centering of Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s vocals”

damn, best album I've heard this year - went into it last night without reading this thread since it got revived

I had a proper listen last night on headphones and found it overwhelming in places - particularly the mid-section of Hey to Don't Walk Away. What an astonishing band.

sub pop appears to have ditched whatever effect they were planning for the cover? mine's just a regular ol' picture

double negative was a distant transmission from another planet and on this one it's actually happening there, if that makes any sense

― ufo, Thursday, July 8, 2021

this makes sense to me

I like this album more the more I listen to it

allmusic review for the new album is not that great. Same guy who reviewed the previous 2.

another thing that strikes me about this album (and double negative) is that they are amazing but also moreso because of the context of the band's entire career, understanding the distance between this and the austere, hymn-like early material, all the evolutions prior to this, the push/pull between simplicity and experimentation they've had all along

like these sounds are so radically digitally fucked up in an amazing way but part of the power is also the core of Low that connects them to everything they've ever did, and the purity Alan and Mimi's harmony singing which can't be completely hidden in an avalanche of plugins pushed to their limit. i guess i feel like it all means more than it would from a new band that made this exact same record.

"the price you pay" is quite the stunner. it's almost like industrial noize

and yet still sounds like Low

all the photos from Square Lake made it look like the ideal Low-seeing setting. might have to go out there sometime and walk around and think "Low played here..."

also they showed Jaws after? I saw Low open for Jaws 10+ years ago, thought it was just a random pairing at the time.

They did, I didn't stick around for it

it wasn't in the square lake park but in someone's garden nearby I think

absolute stunning album.
the vocals marching on come what may, remaining fundamentally intact despite the push and pull of the surrounding s***
feels fitting for these times!
;)

Maybe this is old news, but speaking of Jaws, they've got a limited re-issue (not my word) of the classic Jaws shirt up on their shop now.

Still digesting my first spin of this. Incredible for sure, but hard to put into words.

Put on the vinyl of HEY WHAT and the edited version of White Horses fixes all my issues with it and the locked groove outro to close side 1 is just perfect. Definitely prefer the vinyl listening experience to the digital on this one. What a record.

oh? how different is the vinyl version of White Horses then?

afaik it completely cuts the outro & transitions to "i can wait" in a different way

oooh, thx

I'm curious to hear that; that ticking outro is my least favorite part of the album (I ordered the cd but it hasn't arrived).

just twigged on that 'there's a comma after still' is likely a play on the lyric 'still, white horses take us home'...!

vinyl definitely sands some of the harshest edges off the digital processing stuff without defanging it

not that it matters much but as far as I understand, this record is mostly analog processing, making use of hardware compressors, gates, tape saturation, etc

some great production insights here:

https://gearspace.com/board/electronic-music-instruments-and-electronic-music-production/1261587-lows-double-negative-sound-awesome-production-info-2.html

Guitars are sidechained to analog gates often..every song had drums/rhythm at some point. I just mute that **** since drums date a recording, and use the negative space instead.

used guitar amps for a lot of things on the in...mostly drum machine, and well, guitar. but everything kind of went through different phases of distortion as I’d manipulate in post. i have tape machines, guitar pedals, cassette decks. it’s sort of whatever I feel like using a the time to
get the sound that resonates most with me in the moment. weed helps with that too

these goddamn stoners

i think one of my favorite things about that thread is that a couple years he used all lowercase, and then in his answers for the new one he capitalizes things and uses punctuation. fucking sold out to the man!

They begged BJ to go all caps for HEY WHAT branding; that was the compromise

he's more business savvy than he lets on