Low: Classic or classic?

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

Need more unpronounceable titles like those on 22, A Million

Vinyl master is shorter so we could fit it on two sides with the best fidelity we could get. Couple of the transitions are shorter. https://t.co/SCL4tDolgv

— LOW (@lowtheband) September 20, 2021

explanation for the vinyl being different

i love everything bj wrote in that thread

i'm fine with the shortened transitions, they are kind of unnecessary and IMO the vinyl flows better as a result

Vinyl ruins everything

I like the transitions a lot.

thanks to the live videos ums recently posted upthread, I now own my first Low album and it is v nice.

thanks for the reminder to listen to this again

Would love to see someone reissue the Vernon Yard stuff. Still hoping to stumble across a CD copy of the debut (the only full length I'm missing), but increasingly looking like I'll need to pay $40+ through discogs.

the band's said they've been trying to buy the rights to those albums back for ages to no avail

It wasn't difficult at all to get the second two, but the debut is proving quite elusive. And the EPs from that label? Forget it. I hope they are successful someday.

were those Plain Recordings vinyl represses maybe ten years back of that era bogus?

lol - never mind, I just saw what those represses were going for on discogs. BANK!

https://uproxx.com/indie/bj-burton-interview-producer-indie-low-bon-iver/

good interview with burton, a lot of focus on his work with low

would have loved to hear more about his work with charli though

it's mad how honest and confident this bloke is, just like 'yeah caned a load of ket and made a world-class record'. fair fucks, bj burton

"I just want to have a good time, man. There’s so much more important shit than music. I forgot about that in my 20s, and was a complete functioning alcoholic forever. Now I want to be happy. I mean, hopefully, my shit could land on the radio, if radio could open up their minds a little bit and stop serving everyone Mountain Dew every day. Just take a risk on some shit, that’ll be cool, because I think then I can get my foot in the door and I can get my fucking yacht and go sail around the fucking Caribbean, you know? I’m down for that. Listening to fucking Jimmy Buffett and shit."

That interview is awesome. I love the shit-talking. "I was doing a lot of vocals for music and I was like, “I want to put this with what I do with Low and just have their vocals always upfront and actually maybe even louder than pop music in a cool way.” Like Yeezus, almost. That’s how Kanye likes his vocals. But the difference is Alan’s not annoying. Alan’s actually saying shit that could be important."

I clicked through that link to see the live performance of "Clarence White" he cites, and it was dope but I didn't remember it being so dope on the record. So I went back to the record and, yeah, it's not as dope. I think "The Invisible Way" might have been really important for the band, in the sense that they got a name producer and went for a safer sound and it was met with relative disinterest, so they said, fuck it, we're turning this ship around and heading in the other direction. Of course, having worked with Fridmann in the past they certainly know about pushing things into the red, but I love the idea that they were willing to lose themselves entirely in the music.

Yeah great interview. Funny that he comes across as candid and unfiltered as his forum posts

Then I remember we were at Pachyderm when it first opened again. There was a bluegrass band we were tracking. The only reason I did that album was to get to Alan, because Alan was producing the album and Alan asked me to come help. So it paid off.

laughing at this trampled by turtles dig