Low -- The Great Destroyer

i actually couldn't bare to watch the election coverage this AM, so I watched the video for "Over the Ocean" from the boxset DVD a few times whilst eating breakfast....Low is very much indicative of my mood right now.

(They crashed on my floor once and are extremely kind and friendly folks.)

Yes, it's almost like "Trust" never happened ... they underwent a glacial evolution for a while, then came "Things We Lost In the Fire" (threatening with songs like "Dino Act" and "In Metal"), and the new album feels like the next logical step from those sorts of songs.

I think their most drastic change in approach was the transition from "Fire" to "Trust", but now the latter has been put out to pasture (for now).

so, halfway through this record, and I really wish I could share everyone else's enthusiams, but, er, ah. um. meh.

"trust" was not necessarily my favourite Low record but it had a couple of my top 5 Low songs on it.

Yep yep yep.

Crazy talk!!!!

"(that's how we sing) Amazing Grace" off of Trust is perhaps my favourite

Now that's more like it.

josh, is fridmann's touch that distinctive?

it is whiney and awful

I decided this album is okay. I don't like that Salesman song though or the other song that says something about "rocking". BAH.

Agreed. The run from 'In The Drugs' through 'John Prine' and 'Last Snowstorm' to 'Little Argument' is possibly the strongest section on any Low record.

I've only heard the first half of the Great Destroyer so far and I was most impressed with 'Monkey' and 'Silver Rider' but 'Everybody's Song' was a bit meh on a first hearing.
I really need to give it a good listen.

Low are playing London in a couple of weeks and, like most bands I want to see this year, completely ignoring Scotland :(

The first time I heard 'Monkey' I didn't care much for it - now it's probably one of my favourites. Not because it's all that good, but more because the rest of the album is pretty disappointing.

standouts: 'Monkey', 'Silver Rider', 'Step', 'Death Of A Salesman', 'Pissing'
wants to be the Gin Blossoms: 'California'
wants to be REM: 'Everybody's Song'
wants to be the Beatles: everything else

Maybe it'll grow on me, who can say.

Has anyone else picked up on the feeling through Alan's lyrics that it's all about to end? Two obvious songs about giving up music ('Death Of A Salesman', 'When I Go Deaf') and a handful of other quite strong hints elsewhere (such as "sometimes your voice is not enough").

Low are doing a full tour to support The Great Destroyer once it's actually released, they might go to Scotland then.

as for trust: i think it's the best thing they've ever done. i expected it to be godlike, and it was better than that.

'Monkey' is great.

*blushes*

The last four minutes of "Broadway" may be the best four minutes of their career. It's a similar ending as "Lullaby", but with stunningly cathartic singing as an added bonus.

This definitely seems like the heaviest Low album yet, in content as much as sound. Aldo might be bang on. Did we ever get a full explanation of Zak's 4 mo. hiatus?

how's the cover art, etc.?

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000777J9G.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

picked it up an hour ago at Aron's Records on LP for $10.99

i dunno. there are some superb songs but there seems to be an essential low-ness lacking about the package as a whole.

I suspect we are seeing Low decline from a precious singular band into Just Another Indie Rock Combo.

My main issues are with all those fuzzy guitars bolstering weak songs, and the lack of Mimi throughout

The palate is broader but the pigments are weaker.

x? < "The Great Destroyer" < y?, with x and y being Low albums

and, er, i can't be sure about the ones i haven't heard ;)

"The Great Destroyer" >> Seq(x_i) 
                         i=1..n
                         i=! "The Great Destroyer"
                         n = number of low albums 

MIR (yeah, you're speaking to Jams, but I'm assuming you'll mean me, too), my review of the Low album's going up on PFork by the end of the week - I'll let that speak for me.

but still, dude!

(in mathspeak, each element in the sequence of Low albums (excepting TGD, of course) is a lesser album than TGD)

the sentiment behind it doesn't ;)

"The Great Destroyer" >> for all i in Seq(x_i) 
                                       i=1..n
                                       i=! "The Great Destroyer"
                                       n = number of low albums 
QED, motherfuckers.

For the record, I will stand behind: "Monkey", "California", "Just Stand Back", "Death of a Salesman", "Walk Into the Sea".

MIR: "Broadway" is probably THE song on the album I can't stands (aside from "Everybody's Song") - what about it do you like? (Not trying to stir shit up; just curious.)

The last four minutes of "Broadway" may be the best four minutes of their career. It's a similar ending as "Lullaby", but with stunningly cathartic singing as an added bonus.

That ending is so hypnotic. Like "Lullaby", it's just two chords played over and over, gradually building up and up and up, and as far as I'm concerned it could go on like that for another ten minutes. I can't help but join in on the singing once the song reaches its full flight.

And the verses sound like George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby"!.

xpost to pete

As per my comments on Yanc3y's blog, everyone seems to agree that the "classic" Low songs (Death of a Salesman, Walk Into the Sea, etc.) are great, regardless of how they feel about the rest of the album. Your description of "When I Go Deaf" is spot-on -- yes, the song's second half completely disrupts the mood and tone of the first half.

Many people are frowning upon this -- I am smitten with it. In most Low songs, almost every note sounds so meticulously crafted, as if every sound you hear is there for a specific purpose, with absolutely nothing left behind by accident. Certainly, the slow tempos have a lot to do with this, because each note is accentuated and separated from the others that much more.

Then we hit the second half. On its own, I love the fuzzed-out, grungy timbre in Alan's guitar here. But more to the point, after all the delicacy, and all the attention to the smallest details in their songs, suddenly Low have broken out into a chaotic sprawl and it sounds like they're about to completely lose their shit. The chorus isn't sung as much as it is heaved out of Alan and Mimi's lungs, and it's probably the most unrestrained that they've ever sounded on record. The raw emotion of this portion of the song completely floors me.

Obviously I'm not criticising anyone's taste or opinion here, I'm just writing down what I hear and how I feel about the album.

Fun link: Hollis Mae signing copies of The Great Destroyer at the Electric Fetus in Duluth:
http://www.perfectduluthday.com/2005/01/hollis-rulez_25.html

Will this be Low's good news for people who love bad news or is that completely absurd and not even within the realm of possibility?

To David R., with all due respect, it seems indefensible to make claims about where this disc fits in the evolution of their sound when you're admittedly unfamiliar with the alb that immediately preceded it.

Then again, I fucking love me some Low, so maybe that's fanboy talk.

(On that tip and xpost to Harshaw: I think "California" could make this Low's Good News.)

Not "unfamiliar" - after all, I own the damn thing - but I had an idea of what I remember Trust to be like in my head when I wrote the review, which might or might not be what it "actually" sounds like, & I never went back to listen (which I admittedly should have).

If someone from the Bureau wants to meet me @ my place after work to revoke my license & remove the GPS chip in my neck, feel free. I'm keeping the sweatshirt, tho.

(I ask because our tastes often coincide. Plus, hi. Haven't chatted in a while. Man, I can feel a Ned-like emoticon coming on. Must... resist...)

*gasp*

YOU ALL FORGET "LULLABY"!!!?!????!?!?!?!?

Well, yeah. But I prefer the melody of the first five minutes of "Lullaby" to the first three or four minutes of "Broadway". It's really that subjective in the end. And when I write about it, I can decide to choose honesty!

This is really only a minor quibble, though. The Great Destroyer exceeded my expectations and now resides in my fickle heart, and for that I am grateful for Low's existence all over again.

Oh come on, give in.

There, that feels better.

Yanc3, I'll go check that out when I get a minute in this hectic fucking day! I'll report back.

(Ned, they play LA on March 31)

Low were good; I'm by no means in love with the TGD stuff but was never bored. Never seen them in a room that size; obv preferable to the quiet Maxwells show they headlined after "Things / Fire" where the AUDIENCE TALKED OVER THE SET. (I shushed a couple in front of me; guy to girl: "Will you be quiet so this guy can hear the band?") Still, some partying contingent forced Alan to sing "Happy Birthday" to one of them. What is with the marked Gen Y indie audience's tendency to make the show about them? Obnoxious...

Aarktica's new stuff sounds really neat, esp one song Jon said is about the guy who designed the lights of Times Square; bought it afterward.

http://www.low-in-europe.com/

http://www.twoboots.com/pioneer/

! Strange times.

Um, if you don't mind my being exuberant. This has probably been mentioned elsewhere but let me tease out a key phrase invoked by Barry right at the start of this thread:

it doesn't carry the gravitas and menace that was prominent on the last album

Except I must disagree strongly. Much, if not all, but much of this album IS about gravitas and menace and has been created as such.

For me the cover art is a telling sign -- Zak's Maxfield Parrish-via-sketchbook imagery offset by the blunt appearance of the band name and album title is actually something of a shocking contrast for reasons I can't quite tease out. But it's like a blunt stamp on the face of the world, scarring, a sense of violence. It's a theme that's continued with the art inside, the three individual portraits of the band members against similar backgrounds -- all bleeding either profusely or at least noticeably. There's also the sketch/doodle of the skeletal figure prominently featured inside, further marked with blood red, and the cryptic and not quite readable story inside featuring the 'silver rider' and 'great destroyer' characters invoked in more than one song.

This sense of imagery, to me, calls up one band in particular I don't think has been mentioned yet -- Swans. The very title of the album makes me immediately think of The Great Annihilator but the 'feel' of the album as presentation also feels like the early to mid-nineties version of Swans, where the sheer punishment of the early days had long since transmogrified into a combination of sternness and shimmering beauty, apocalyptic imagery running rampant in a self-consciously epic vein, where much of Gira's lyrical imagery in particular focused on generalized but still evocative portraits of an archetypal world, a fairy tale and a mythology on the broadest scale. This is what I sense from much of this album -- the sheer power of the first few songs not only completely caught me off guard but absolutely thrilled me beyond mention, because it is still Low performing it but now the music almost acts as warning and signal, a soundtrack to a huge story like the one told in the liner notes. The quieter songs and the more 'down to earth' moments ensure it isn't always like this but I think the mood and moment is established early and consistently enough that the album can't be heard in anything other than that light.

This is really something. It might just be my album of the year too already. Still plenty of time to come, though.

When I wrote that, I was thinking about the abscence of songs like "The Lamb" and "John Prine". The lack of a proper backbeat and the sludgy tempos (even for Low) create a near-stasis which makes the atmosphere almost imbearably tense (and yes, menacing). There's nothing on TGD that can scare the shit out of me like those songs on Trust, but the menace is still there, albeit in different forms as Ned detailed in his post.

And the mid-90's Swans comparison is a good one.

it's still sagging in the middle for me - "everybody's song" through to "on the edge of" just aren't making an impression yet, but i'm prepared to bet now that i end up loving them. there's something about the album as a whole that keeps dragging me back.

"In Chiapas, missionaries battle for converts"

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico _ Outside this city of colonial churches and cobblestone streets built by Maya and Spaniards, Juan Gomez finds shade from a blinding afternoon sun inside his small wooden hut.

A beatific smile radiates from the young Tzotzil Maya as he haltingly reads the Koran in Arabic.

Gomez, 26, a former Protestant who became Muslim in 1996, is learning the language as a convert to Islam. He embodies a religious phenomenon in Chiapas, where one-quarter of the 3.9 million people are poor Maya peasants who practice myriad religions, often blending ancient rituals with Roman Catholicism.

The religious conquest of Chiapas persists five centuries after Spanish priests fought to convert the Maya, burning their books of complex hieroglyphics. Chiapas is unusual in mostly Catholic Mexico for its near-constant state of religious turmoil. Anthropologists say the historical lack of a centralized political or religious system _ combined with a strong tradition of spirituality _ have left the Maya people who live here easily swayed by missionaries, who have descended repeatedly on Chiapas in search of converts.

Since the arrival of U.S.-based Protestant missionaries decades ago, this southernmost state bordering Guatemala has been wracked by violent clashes as faiths compete for souls.

Islam joined the religious skirmishes in 1995 with the arrival of Muslim missionaries from Spain. So far, they have converted about 300 Chiapas families. There are only a few thousand Muslims in Mexico, compared with 6 million in the United States.

"Islam is the path to the truth," Gomez, whose Muslim name is Yahya, said as his 2-year-old son, Muhammad, giggled and his pregnant wife looked on. "They adore one God and the law of God, which respects all people and asserts that if you kill one person, you kill the whole world."

For three generations, Gomez's family has sought spiritual peace, going from Catholic to Protestant and now Muslim. In the 1970s, Gomez's father led one of the first Protestant families to be chased out of the nearby town of San Juan Chamula by Catholics armed with sticks, stones and machetes.

Here, the gamut of Protestant denominations, ranging from soul-seeking Presbyterians to Pentecostals and Seventh-day Adventists, are collectively known as "evangelicals." Mormons are lumped into the same category.

The Islamic missionaries arrived here from Granada, Spain, soon after armed Zapatista rebels took over several towns in an uprising to demand better living conditions for Maya peasants in 1994.

The Spaniards are members of Murabitun, a Muslim order active in England, Chechnya, South Africa, Germany and now Mexico. The Murabitun are converts to the mystical Sufi strain of Islam, and are outside the more mainstream Shiite and Sunni branches.

Their worldwide leader is Shaykh Abdalqadir al Murabit, formerly Ian Dallas of Britain, who professes a "communal," anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic form of Islam. In Mexico they are led by Aureliano Perez, who calls himself Emir Nafia and lives on the outskirts of San Cristobal with his family.

Perez, who has received mostly bad press, is wary of the news media. He spoke briefly about his goals in Chiapas and denied ties to al-Qaida or being a Shiite, as some newspapers here have speculated.

Perez said his funding came from Arab philanthropists and small businesses. The community also runs an Islamic seminary, and has built a mosque on the outskirts of San Cristobal.

The other face of Islam in Mexico is led by Imam Omar, otherwise known as Omar Weston, who came here from England with his Christian family as a boy. He now lives in Morelos state, hundreds of miles from Chiapas.

In 1995, as the leader of Mexico's Nation of Islam, "I opened the doors for Nafia," Weston said of Perez. But he said Perez's view strayed from mainstream Islam.

"Fundamentally, their economic ideas have more of a social focus, social reform. For example, they believe in unions. And they say 'If you're not with me, you're not well with Islam,"' Weston, 35, said in a telephone interview.

"But Nafia has helped the phenomenon of Islam. He has given it publicity," Weston added.

The differences between the two Mexican versions of Islam are captured in the Gomez family. They've split from Perez, continuing a family tradition of religious seeking. Two years ago, they became Sunni under Weston, saying the Murabitun don't adhere to the Koran and are "condescending" to the indigenous.

"They invent things. They sing and dance. They make things up that are not in the Koran," Gomez said.

San Cristobal Bishop Felipe Arizmendi said Chiapas had the greatest variety of religious practices of any Mexican state, with new groups appearing frequently and worshippers hopping back and forth among them. The Muslims, he said, are the latest and most exotic.

"The Maya switch as much from the Catholics as they do from evangelicals or traditional Protestants. So much so that we now have to add the new term of 'nonbiblical evangelicals,"' he said.

Jose Maria Morales, the director of religious affairs for the Interior Ministry of Chiapas, said, "It's the first time that Spanish citizens have come here to try to convert, above all, the Tzotzil Maya, to Islam. It's completely alien to Chiapas."

"Because of the world situation it has generated a climate of mistrust and curiosity," he said, noting that the Muslim group has "conducted itself with propriety and absolute normalcy."

The Protestant impact has been far greater.

"Evangelicals" have converted almost 40 percent of the population, almost entirely at the expense of Catholicism. Only 61 percent of Chiapas is Catholic, the lowest anywhere in Mexico.

Hatred and distrust abound between Protestants and so-called "traditional Catholics," who aren't Catholics at all in the usual sense. They practice a mixture of Maya and Roman Catholic ritual, reject the Bible and hire shamans to ward off evil spirits that cause illness or sin.

Nowhere is the mysterious meld of Maya-Christian credo more visible than in San Juan Chamula, in the dreamlike interior of Church of St. John the Baptist, their patron saint.

Mounds of pine needles cover the floor as Chamulans flock to the house of worship, then kneel amid candles and incense that cast clouds of blinding smoke. The only sacrament received is baptism.

Meanwhile, evangelical Chamulans, living in shantytowns around San Cristobal de Las Casas, eschew alcohol, chant piercing gospel songs, dance to tambourines and clap thunderously in a trance-like state.

In the past four decades some 30,000 Protestant converts have been violently expelled from Chamula alone. The forced expulsions continue, and about 170 evangelical children still are banned from public schools for fear of religious "contamination."

When peace seems at hand, a spree of murders, lynchings and torchings of evangelical temples breaks out.

"This is a time bomb," said Inocencio Rivero Gonzalez, a police agent with the department of state investigations. Since January, when a violent religious clash left seven dead, Rivero and a dozen officers have patrolled the Chiapas town of Tres Cruces.

So far, despite the anxiety they inspire elsewhere, the Muslims in Chiapas haven't been targets of violence.

Dude, what Ned said. They were DROWNING OUT the fucking band.

i hardly think the melody is weak. it's just direct. it's a song written for an acoustic guitar.

xpost
Kyle, I love how we agree on everything now!

(I don't mind the song but it does seem out of place right before the ending. Might make a good stand-alone track, though.)

pretty much the same thing in DC last night. fucking annoying--especially since there's another full bar downstairs where you can go if you don't like/don't care about the band.

kyle: You know, I never think of "Dinosaur Act" as loud, in the same way that, say, "Canada" is loud. The former still has all their trademark yawning silences, which I also love. I'm just in one of those obsessive phases with this band, right now, where everything they've done sounds good! Don't mind me.

Absolutely superb. Many tracks stood out - When I Go Blind, Laser Beam, Death of a Salesman.

Kyle - on the subject of whose breast is being sung about at the end of Death of a Salesman, Low's t-shirt might give you a clue:

"Someday this will all make sense"

http://www.chairkickers.com/images/merch_thunderbolt_yellow.jpg

I'm really not sure how to take the change. Low used to be something unbelievably special and now... they're not. Alan even seems to have changed facially. This is really going to take some adjusting to.

It is really good so far. Monkey really grabbed me.

Instead, it's simply that the calibre of songwriting seems to have slipped considerably. For all the talk of a "big new sound," it sounds more to me like they have regressed to their earliest sound + amps. That sound was effective at the time, but they grew in maturity well beyond it. 'The Great Destroyer' sounds, for the most part, a bit freeze-dried: the mystery, the gravitas, the grace--all seem to have been swept aside, leaving something that at its worst sounds rather like the generic 90s "alternative rock" against which Low were originally crusading. These musicians are so talented and thoughtful that I'm certain there's nothing crass or second-guessed going on; no band can maintain the trajectory they had been the last seven or eight years indefinitely. I think they'll be back.

i played him the CD and he said it was unlistenable at the low end.

personally, i like the way the CD sounds.

Spencer--
So, apparently, that is the way LOW wanted their record....

This is from our production guy:
Yeah, this is an old complaint. It's SUPPOSED to be that way...*Sigh*.

it's worth pointing out that my mate, although a wonderful and lovely chap, is also renowned throughout large chunks of the country for his baffling and bewildering bouts of wired-to-the-moon weirdness.

I think its perfect on songs like "Monkey" and "On The Edge Of". The bass just rumbles and it seems so overwhelming at times. I like that.

This one does zip for me.

I wondered about the mastering, too, when I first downloaded it several months in advance of the release. I hoped maybe it was an early mix or a problem with the mp3 encoding; but the CD sounds just the same--bizzarely compressed. I was expecting something much clearer and expansive, given the choice of producer.

Alan doesn't get nearly enough props for his guitar playing.

Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight is the tape I have of them performing on my KUCI show six months later. Including what I believe was the first-ever recorded (by default) version of "Transmission" they did.

I've been listening to "On The Edge Of" 4 or 5 times a day..

Then again, I didn't understand the disappointment with 'Trust' or the disporportionate acclaim for 'Things We Lost'. I like them both equally, and both less than 'Secret Name'.

Still, a great band and I look forward to what they'll do next.

also worth hearing is the acoustic version of "walk into the sea", which is on a cd with the current cwas (or on slsk, obv). not as good as the original, but interesting.

http://www.chairkickers.com/toast/toast.asp?sub=show&action=posts&fid=4&tid=285

this is a really good album....wonder if there will ever be another?

saw Alan's new band, Retribution Gospel Choir....very great....sort of the logical extension of Great Destroyer, but way more active drumming and bass, and a huge section in the middle of the set that was almost a raga rock exploration bit...had this wierd spinning light rig, kinda trippy....alan's a great great noisy guitar player....I hope RGC does an album....

Because you haven't seen mine yet.

The mastering is really incredibly poor, such a shame. I heard the leaked version and hoped it'd been recorded from slightly distorted radio or something. But tha album is a grower.

'Secret Name' remains my favourite, but they're just pretty great all around.

try making mp3s out of it and see how they sound. I'm wondering now if this is some bizarre attempt at copy restriction. Ihaven't heard the last Go Betweens album but I heard the complaints about it and they were the same.

silver rider and on the edge of is pretty good. some of it is dissapointingly meh rock-ishness. but i haven't listened to the whole thing yet.
― La Monte (La Monte), Monday, November 8, 2004 6:48 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

so wrong back then. this record is brutal and gorgeous. i love it.

Yes

This is absolutely one of my favourite records of all time, it seems so strange to read through this thread and see disappointed reactions - then again, this record was the first I heard of Low so maybe I approached it in a completely different way.

Still their best album by far.

Great album. Not really comparable as "better" or "worse" than their previous stuff, it's such a different beast altogether.

somewhere, in some alternate universe, monkey holds the no. 1 spot on the billboard rock charts for weeks and weeks.

Next month I'm seeing them in a small barn :)

Such a great record. Some days Silver Rider is my POO. When are we polling their catalog? That's going to be insane.

Please don't

If we polled Low the thread would be constantly interrupted by people shushing.

Oddly, there's a poster of this album cover on the set of 'Grey's Anatomy'.

http://i.imgur.com/3AhNehh.jpg

Good album imo

depending on the day, this or Trust is my favourite of theirs