Low: Classic or classic?

I think they're alright, I think their obvious dedication to their sound and art is fairly admirable, but the resulting records don't move me (the Christmas one is quite nice).

In some of the praise of them there's an undertow of virtues-of- simplicity stuff, and I can see why - when I listen to Low the word that often comes to mind is 'quaint'. You feel a little better for owning a Low record, I suppose, like a piece of handmade furniture or something. They're not classic.

ha I never said on this thread that 'the curtain hits the cast' is one of my few most favorite albums ever.

i watched that low documentary on cable last nite. maaaaaaaan, was that boring. not even two members of napalm death could pep things up. HOW IRONIC LOW DUDE THEY ARE IN NAPALM DEATH AND YOU ARE IN LOW AND YOU ARE IN THE SAME BUILDING WHAT ARE THE ODDS. on the other hand, it made me want to listen to low records. i do like low. and watching low live from my couch is, if you ask me, the best friggin' place on earth to watch low live.

hahah, interesting post. a boring documentary that made you wanna listen to the records. i can see that. good documentary i guess, rather slow, i own it but have only watched it once, so far.

the live footage is indeed superb.

that's the Low In Europe thing, right? I've got that DVD too, should really watch it again too

they should have set up the most boring people alive premise even more than they did. they sould have called the doc: HOW LOW CAN YOU GO:THE DIRTY DULUTH 3 LAY WASTE TO EUROPE! with girls gone wild cover art.

Maybe the sequel will be even lower

Low & Lowerer, with new bass player Jim Carrey

ultimately characterless and forgettable

lol. Heard Drums and Guns?

it hadn't been released back then

i have "low in europe" and only got halfway through it. hmm. and as you all know, i adore them.

vvv tickled to see the original post -- it was alex who got me into low, some ... fucking hell, 12 years ago now. christ.

which album do I listen to right now if I've never heard any of them before? quick!

I think The Great Destroyer is very accessible, so that may be a good entry point. But I guess Things We Lost In The Fire might be a more representative disc.

A handful of songs on the new disc (called Drums and Guns) are also an excellent introduction to the band. Try, for example, this killer (no pun intended) version of Murderer, from a live, in-studio performance last year.

Things We Lost in the Fire is a great introduction. I'd also recommend Secret Name, which was my intro, also very good.

Things We Lost in the Fire, definitely. Worked for me at least, from the first chord change.

Anyone see that film about Low that's now showing on Pitchfork.tv? It's called You Might Need A Murderer. I didn't know how troubled Alan Spearhawk was. Semi-boring film, but a totally compelling band.

Oh it's on Pitchfork.tv? Sweet, I saw it in the local record store today and passed on it ($20 brand new) but i'll totally watch it for free. One of my all time favorite bands, love these guys.

npr interview with the sparhawks a while ago that touched on his issues

Catch it now, Stephen. It's the "One Week Only" feature on Pitchfork.tv.

That NPR interview is fascinating. Sparhawk dances around his problems some, but this is the first time I've heard he was suicidal.

Thanks Daniel, I'll be sure to check it out Sunday morning when i get up :D

Retribution Gospel Choir (Alan's new, catchier, LOUD, rock band) played a sparsely attended show in Montreal on Friday that was fucking amazing. PLayed their hearts out for we seated folk, left my ears so happily ringing. Was sad to see him loading up the van alone in the street afterward (last time I saw Low it was at ATP with another 1000 people). If Retribution Gospel Choir come to chez toi, go go go. terrific.

Low have subtley crept, over the course of about ten years, into the position of being my favorite existing band.

"subtly"

Some good discussion on this thread, methinks.

Retribution Gospel Choir (Alan's new, catchier, LOUD, rock band) played a sparsely attended show in Montreal on Friday that was fucking amazing.

ARGH I was on the list for this but couldn't go, damn you, job.

I've seen them 7-8 times since 1997 and have observed as the venue/audience size has grown in tandem with the expanse of the band's dynamic (louder choruses, distortion pedals and such). The songs from their last few records are perfectly suited to the mid-size theatres they play these days. But my favorite gigs were one in the mid-to-late 90's, when they would come through the Ann Arbor/Detroit area quite regularly and play at little hole-in-the-wall spots: The (small) audience would generally sit on the floor and remain dead silent until the band finished playing (save for the occasional applause). There was a communal reverence, churchlike almost, unlike anything else I've experienced at rock gigs (even a "seated" Yo La Tengo show from their And Then Nothing.. tour, in which the band/venue provided the audience with folding chairs, didn't come close). It was a beautiful thing to be a part of, really.

I totally get that. I'm sure you'd agree, though, that they deserve all the additional attention -- and higher audience attendance at shows -- that they now get. I'm with you: Low has become one of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite, band of the moment.

I'll third that. Best band going today.

i saw RGC a few years back with Kozelek and they were alright but the drummer was really stiff; if it's the same guy I'm sure they've loosened up a bit. I'm assuming Kozelek isn't on this tour.

the best thing they played though was a crazy ass cover of "the carpet crawlers"

I'm sure you'd agree, though, that they deserve all the additional attention -- and higher audience attendance at shows

Yeah, it has actually been very rewarding to watch a humble little band like Low build and expand their aesthetic over the years, and at the same time gain popularity because of the sheer quality of their art. Even thought I have those fond memories of tiny quiet shows, I have no problem sharing Low with The World.

Strictly in terms of popularity, though, I know Low is bigger in Europe than The States, at least circa early-2000s. Was it that way in the mid-to-late 90's too? I'd been used to Low concerts being generally as described above. But then, in 2000, I moved to Dublin for college and twice saw Low in sold-out concerts at The Olympia, a fairly large theatre (fantastic shows both, one with cello!).

"thought" = though

stop all the clocks, quieten all the whisperings about low's republican tendencies:

low are playing an obama benefit somewhere.

they're also doing christmas shows in the uk, in november.

“just stand back” is an outrageously perfect power-pop song i’ll hear nothing said against it

first album i heard was the curtain is the cast. actual favorite low album at this point is either trust or ones & sixes. (i’m right)

I think if you have a steady favourite Low album you’re doing it wrong, but under cover of that caveat my ranking would be:

1 .First Tier: Curtain Hits the Cast, Trust, Ones and Sixes, Double Negative
2. Second Tier: I Could Live In Hope, Things We Lost In The Fire, Drums & Guns, Hey What
3. Third Tier: Long Division, Secret Name, The Great Destroyer
4. Fourth Tier: Songs For A Dead Pilot (if it counts), C’Mon
5. Fifth Tier: The Invisible Way

But the distance between these tiers is remarkably small IMO. I think of Low as having been a bit like a virus, always mutating to maintain virulence and evade immunity, but almost always remaining somehow uncompromisingly themselves.

TWLITF is my favorite and my appreciation for it deepened a lot after kids/marriage but it was always my favorite. I never really paid a lot of attention to the content of “In Metal” until after having a kid and when it clicked it became a difficult song for me to listen to. I love it, it makes me cry.

“just stand back” is an outrageously perfect power-pop song i’ll hear nothing said against it

this is wrong, total outlier track, truly horrible song. i think of that four song run on TGD as the worst four songs of their entire career, unlistenable imho

it’s just more evidence that your feelings about low are very much your own

likewise.

i guess? idk does anyone else here think "on the edge of" sucks?

Trust and Curtain will forever be associated with one of the most confusing and thus one of the most psychologically crucial periods of my life, age 19-20 or so.

'double negative' and age 34-35 for me

Low's discography is so singular that arguing over this is like arguing over which phase of Picasso is better

OTM

'On the Edge Of' and 'Just Stand Back' are both great imho.

i guess? idk does anyone else here think "on the edge of" sucks?

as is typical for you, you make a point about subjectivity of taste, i agree, then you proceed to invite others to slag my subjective opinion.

I didn't interpret that comment as an opportunity to slam you but ymmv

“On the Edge Of” is predictable, imho, and even with the loud verse/soft chorus element, it lacks some dynamic tension that leaves me feeling utterly “meh” about it.

“just stand back” is like “canada” or any number of their other rock oriented tracks from earlier albums— ymmv. my mileage for Low doing power pop is zero.

i admit that i actually still occasionally wish that they’d just stayed with the sound of their earlier records, because that sound is what makes them special to me, and it is the remnants of that sound that make the later records good to me.

I didn't interpret that comment as an opportunity to slam you but ymmv

“i guess? anyone else agree with table’s shitty opinion?”

that is the implicit framing of ivy’s question.

I don’t think there’s a Low song that rocks too much for me, but that’s definitely why I can’t get into Retribution Gospel Choir. They’re not bad at all, but almost everything I like about Low is missing.

It is a great band name though.

sorry for framing it like that! idk your opinions on this band seem sooo personal yet get constantly rehashed here as if you see something essentially true about their early work vs. their later work, and yet i have glimpsed very little depth in those opinions other than "this stretch of songs is their absolute worst." i was glad you explained your lyrical hangups upthread, i was like "ok yeah i get that"

the great destroyer came out two years after i really fell for the curtain is the cast, not sure where it stands in my low rankings but i not only really got into it at the time but it's returned to me at odd intervals in my life, e.g. in 2010 i remember listening to "monkey" very quietly in my headphones on the floor of someone's east village apartment after we hooked up, and writing a short piece about that experience a few months later in an attempt to combine music and sex writing and explain why i found "monkey" so creepy and sexy at once

and i guess one of the things i believe to be true about this band is that the basic songcraft never flags across their discography, even when they're doing different things with their sound and arrangement. "just stand back" is like 3-4 perfect melodies stitched together beautifully

i get it, and you’re probably right— they’re my favorite band, the band i saw the most live before Mimi’s passing, so at times my hyperbole and feelings take over any rationality when discussing them. sometimes stepping back is hard to do with a music that means so much to me.

fwiw i also find “monkey” to be weirdly sexy— something about the shimmering dark lust of possession voiced by both (tonight you will be mine) juxtaposed with the way Alan’s register drops and goes it alone (tonight the monkey dies) is definitely weirdly erotic

one of my favorite keyboard tones too

Okay, off to try Monkey again. It’s never clicked with me and that’s why it took me a while to appreciate TGD.

I rarely listen to TGD as an album but I had Silver Rider as my #1 in the poll. It's all about the la la las as the music swells. So overwhelming and beautiful.

When I Grow Deaf as taken on more resonance as I've grown older. Very moving song.

“On the Edge Of” is definitely a favorite of mine. Probably my best memory of seeing them live.

The last time I saw them, only
months before Mimi’s passing, they played “Two-Step.” I had never heard them play it before— never felt such a well of emotion at a concert. That and when they did the cover of “Stay” at HSB in 2013.

Mentioned this before maybe, but I saw them TWICE on my birthday— once in Oberlin, Ohio, and once in San Francisco, eleven years apart. Kind of crazy to think about.

xxpost speaking of la la la la: here's one that only has been on a vinyl B-side:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR43hxNuQtM

That single version of Murderer is a different recording,
and really good.

One mistake we seem to make over and over again on ILM is imagining that subjectivity and objectivity are static concepts, or perhaps belief systems, when in truth (at least for our purposes) they are shorthands for modes of engagement with one another’s experiences of music. Are we curious enough to try to imagine the vantage point from which another person hears a given piece of music the way they claim to, or aren’t we?

curious and also charitable. and also can we paint a picture of ourselves liking music in a way that highlights the subjectivity. instead of saying over and over again 'these are my preferences' without revealing why. or even understanding why.

Yes

In truth "Just Stand Back" isn't hugely important to me ("On The Edge Of" and "Cue The Strings" and "Broadway" are entirely different matters) but I feel like my life would be ever so slightly poorer without being able to say that I know this song, that I know what this perfectly-formed piece of Low-shaped power-pop sounds like.

At least some of my thinking about Low in a "whole of career" sense (as opposed to at the level of individual song or album engagement) was shaped by coming to The Paradise Motel first - a band that emerged at roughly the same time and in broadly the same stylistic patch but sought to cover in about 5 years the ground that Low would slowly explore over 25 - not just aching slow repetition but also stomping, driving urgency; eerie ambience; percussive distortion; gestures at pop.

This sounds like I'm about to say that TPM were the better or more important band, but I'm not. Rather, that framing throws into sharper relief for me the patient, careful and methodical manner in which Low went about expanding the parameters of their sound, until just about all you could definitely point to as defining that sound were Alan and Mimi's harmonies and a certain air of deliberateness which they brought to each endeavour. Unlike TPM, who felt like they'd largely exhausted the field of possibilities for themselves within a 5-year span, I do feel like Low could have continued near-indefinitely, continuing to find new and unexpected wrinkles to their aesthetic, while, with each album, also feeling like they had somehow arrived at an end-point of sorts. Perhaps a place can only be a launch-pad once it has first become a destination, a beginning must complete something else before it can be the beginning of something new.

And given that that capacity seemingly was opened up by the cautiousness with which they approached changing their style, it feels to me (I stress: to me) almost perverse to imagine wanting them to have changed less or even more slowly, because their gradual, alchemical transformations already throw lustre forward and backward across the length of their oeuvre.

I'm reminded of something Glenn McDonald wrote when he reviewed Secret Name back in 1999:

"Trying to convey the experience by describing it is inherently hopeless, of course. Low has spent six albums retreating, and I've followed them, getting closer and closer because it was the only way to hear them at all, and from farther away Secret Name's explosion of noise would probably barely sound like a fizzle. Buzzing that wouldn't qualify as background texture in a Prodigy rant sounds, in a Low song, like the Earth methodically sawing itself in half. These drums won't crash, in your ears, unless you've internalized the way Mimi usually taps them. If you haven't heard how she can making not singing sound tenser than singing, the tiny rasps as she leans into the lines of "Days Of..." won't sound like the hibernating dragon at the heart of the world gradually shrugging off sleep. A thousand other bands have hired string sections; if you don't know how empty these spaces in Low songs would have been before, you won't stagger when you hear strings materialize in them. You've heard other Steve Albini recordings, perhaps (and I used to think I didn't like him, but between this and Vent 414's album I realize that position has become firmly untenable), but you can't appreciate from them what an accomplishment it is to find nuances in Low's performances that escaped their previous producers (including themselves). If you don't listen to this album right now, maybe, the whispering in the background of one of these songs won't pull your head back and forth between the speaker cones, convinced in alternation that a textbook of universal truths is being read aloud in the other one. Reduced to its outline, this album's revelation doesn't sound like much: Low have always made spare, quiet records, and this one is denser and louder. The sun has always risen, and this morning it didn't. I can't give you this experience. I can't hand you the sudden certainty that humans are far more complicated and durable than we ever suspected. I can't be sure this experience exists anywhere you can reach. All I can do is give you the map that took me here and hope the course it marks resembles the one I traveled. Buy the rest of Low's albums. Learn them in order, over the course of years, paying closer attention to each one as you go. Fall far enough into their spell that The Curtain Hits the Cast would have made your top-ten list if it were new the year you get to it. See them play at least once, so you know what the 1998 live album is missing. Learn Stina Nordenstam and Talk Talk and the Cowboy Junkies and Lisa Germano and Ida and the Secret Stars and Stuart Dempster, so you have some sense of how many shades there are to quiet. Reach this album hoping to learn something about yourself, to measure your degree of connection to the world. And discover, as it unfolds, that asking how connected you are to the world is nonsensical. You don't have to be observant to see so much wonder in the world that no idea could be more painful than leaving it. Just look around you. Rapture lies in every direction but, at most, one."

But it works in reverse too: the spareness of The Curtain Hits The Cast is more meaningful to me now in part because I also know what Low could and ultimately did achieve when they liberated themselves from those aesthetic strictures. The beauty of any accent lies in part in how strange it can sound in the ears of the speaker of another.

Huh, I don't think I've ever heard or even heard of The Paradise Motel!

Thanks for that, Tim.

One mistake we seem to make over and over again on ILM is imagining that subjectivity and objectivity are static concepts, or perhaps belief systems, when in truth (at least for our purposes) they are shorthands for modes of engagement with one another’s experiences of music. Are we curious enough to try to imagine the vantage point from which another person hears a given piece of music the way they claim to, or aren’t we?

I know that this is pointed, but I also think that this is really difficult, and much easier written than practiced. Fwiw I do try, but as I wrote upthread, with a band like Low, I am content with people having very personal and different relationships with their music. When I get hyperbolic and seemingly angry about differences, it’s often because I am unable to access what the other person is describing.

For example, one thing about DN and HW that many bigger fans of those records note is the sociopolitical content/context surrounding them, but that is what I see as detrimental to their overall quality. Some people need Low for that, but I don’t go to Low for that kind of thing— that’s what hardcore and punk are for, in my musical world. That difference is fine, but I think that sometimes I wish people could hear a track like “Shots & Ladders” from my perspective, having been through medical hell and back several times. Or having been an addict listening to a song like “Dragonfly.” Or a former scared gay kid listening to a song like “Words.” This isn’t a claim to feeling their music better or in a more special way, but rather that what we find captivating in their music is really personal, in a way that it sometimes isn’t with other groups. Yeah, the quiet grace of “Two-Step” should send most of us into tears, but the reasons behind those tears are entirely our own beyond simple appreciation of the beauty of the band’s sound. And sometimes that’s enough.

the great destroyer is their most conventional indie rock album but it's excellent at that, i love the harmonies on "just stand back"

this thread has brought out some wonderful posts, thanks

i don't see double negative and hey what as primarily being political albums, it's not like they're not engaged at all there but the closest either gets to emphasising that is "days like these"

i don’t think HW is (excepting Days Lkke These) , but i think of DN as their most political album.

It hadn't occurred to me that either of the last two albums might be especially political by Low's standards. DN in particular has their most minimalist lyrics (maybe "Disarray" aside) since the first few albums, and in many senses its relationship to the wider world feels as political to me as their music (lyrically and otherwise) always has. When in "Disarray" they sing "This evil spirit, man, it's bringing me down / It tells me not to do the things that I should / It graduated to the back of the bus / They say you let it in when you took the drugs", it feels to me of a piece with the line in "Same", "I'm tired of waking up with the same clothes and the same holes in my skin".

If there is a thematic throughline to the last three albums for me, it is about the limitations of communication and understanding, largely narrativized on "Ones and Sixes" (so many of the songs are about the singer(s) looking to another, or being looked to by another, for answers, when none are there), then literalized at the level of the music itself on Double Negative, before achieving a kind of synthesis or mediation between those two approaches on Hey What.

I think often when their lyrics sounds most tossed-off in their later work there is something very deliberate going on.

When it opens with "When they found you on the edge of the road, you had a pistol underneath your coat...", "Lies" sounds like it's going to be a return to the archetypal solemn middle-period Low epic (both Things We Lost... and Trust begin with the retrieval of a dead body), before immediately jumping away to "But it all started back in '79...", and then breaking its own storytelling fourth wall: "--Why don't you tell me what you really want, instead of making up the same old lies, lies, lies?" Those jump cuts which might signal a kind of storytelling impatience to some (though Low's songs were always filled with jump cuts like that - "Violence" would seem ridiculous if it wasn't intoned with the slowness and inevitability of a glacier), but to me it's storytelling about impatience, about Alan wrestling with the fact that he suspects he can only approach his subject matter obliquely, that the kind of hermetically sealed narrative plenitude of a "Sunflowers" or "(That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace" might be just as distortive in its pristine perfection.

(none of which is intended to give Low's lyrics a kind of general-purpose free pass - whatever they may have been trying to do with the ending of "Witches", I still can't appreciate it)

That’s interesting, because for me “Lies” is a great song, but I get a different feeling from the lyrical content— to me it feels a bit like pastiche, which isn’t a bad tactic lyrically, but where you hear storytelling about impatience, I hear Alan cribbing lines from pop and rock music of the past 50 years, which simply doesn’t affect me emotionally as much as what you term the hermetically sealed songs or moments.

This isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate referentiality— it’s all over his lyrics. The Marvin Gaye line in “In the Drugs” makes me smile every time, but it also serves the general throughline of the song, whereas storytelling about impatience and obliquity simply isn’t as interesting, and feels less unified at that. I understand that some might appreciate that quality, and I do to a certain degree, but I like songs like “Lies” almost in spite of their lyrics rather than because of them, whereas with earlier albums I simply love the whole thing.

Something that I was going to say here but which it turned out I already said on the pre-poll thread several years ago is how I hear a secret connection between The Great Destroyer and Hey What:

I was interested to go back to Double Negative after not listening to it for a while. I was wondering if its experiments would feel at once self-conscious and redundant after Hey What anchored the same overall sound within generally more coherent songs. But no, its bruised quality is still so powerful. Listening to it I switched to thinking "maybe Hey What will now sound lesser when I put it on". Of course I then tried that, and it really brought out the satisfying immediacy and present-ness of the sound on Hey What, which I now somewhat associate with The Great Destroyer.

― Tim F, Monday, 8 November 2021 11:18 (four years ago)

Like, the band who just made "More" is definitely the band who made "Everybody's Song".

― Tim F, Monday, 8 November 2021 11:20 (four years ago)

the best part of the Burton-produced run is how obvious it is Mimi is the MVP. listening to "what part of me" is a fantastic example of a lead Alan number but Mimi completely tops it.

i remember reading the p4k review during the initial publication and this one section was what completely reorganized how i listened to the output of any artist/director/etc.

I doubt Low fans who've held on this long will rebel against these new textures, more the way they're employed-- the band has added an almost disconcerting levity, and subtracted the gentleness. The less said about the jaunty funk bass and busier loops of "Always Fade" and "Hatchet" the better; the latter is at least a mid-record palette-cleanser. It's this mode of Low that's the hardest to get used to; they sounding less sparse and more glib and underdeveloped, lost in uncharted territory. Parker, thankfully more present here than on recent records, gets "Dust on the Window" to herself, and its dusky balladry is a high point in a difficult middle section. Sequencing does threaten to kill this record, though there's ropes to old fans and frustrated listeners later in the album. "Take Your Time" is a dip into the pathos of previous Low records, even using church bells to further dampen the dirge. Should this not be enough for alienated fans, try to take comfort in the seven other albums that came before. There's a point at which a consistent sound is no longer a virtue. "Your Poison" shows us what Low would sound like as Guided By Voices; we don't need it. Once you're approaching double digits in album output, your records should actually do something to change status quo and justify their release, or at the very least spark some shred of interest in new listeners with the band's back catalog.

try to take comfort in the seven other albums that came before

That’s what I continue to do— and over the past week, I’ve listened to the newer records, and honestly still don’t like them anywhere near as much as the older records. There’s a reason I don’t think about them or go back to them much.

Now what interests me is that I rather liked songs from these records when performed live— but the records themselves leave me feeling cold.

It's interesting how we all have different reactions to the same band. I go back to 'I Could Live In Hope', 'Secret Name', 'Things We Lost In The Fire' & 'Ones and Sixes' all the time. I love all their periods and listen widely across them but those albums are my comfort zone. I've said before on here that I'm not the biggest fan of 'The Invisible Way' but that's mostly because 'Plastic Cup' is the one Low song where I cannot stand the lyrics. There are moments of sublime beauty and connection across their entire discography for me and that's why they're my favourite band. They were also astonishing live and I was lucky enough to see them six times over the years and I cherish those memories

They're just a great band whose catalog is degrees of good to great, and all worthwhile. No whammies.

i agree, i just never *want* to listen to anything after Trust, if i am being honest. i have to make an effort, or a song has to come on shuffle.

Didn't know until weeks ago that the last albums had been polarizing. I think "Always Trying to Work It Out" and "Hey" are some of their very best songs.

I think all of their albums have some of their very best songs. not sure about the tweedy album, I was forget about that one, but I assume it does, too.

“Always Trying to Work it Out” might be my least favorite Low song of all time lol

My god, Low fans are so different. Not quite Scott Walker levels of disagreeing fans but it does seem unusual.

I was a die-hard fan from the first album (bought solely based on the album cover in 1994). Bought every 7”, searched out every compilation appearance all the way through TWLITF, which was the first time I felt like there were no new ideas lurking in the record. Even though I really liked it, it’s when I felt myself starting to move on from Low. When Trust came out I actually didn’t even buy it. Then when Great Destroyer came out I really didn’t like the direction they were moving in. I was put off by early tracks from Drums & Guns too (Monkey and Breaker, two songs which to this day I still don’t like.)

So basically that was about 7 years of hardcore fandom followed by nearly 10 years of tangential interest at best, even though I still adored the early albums. At some point I decided to do a deep re-listen and finally after a loooong time, Things We Lost suddenly opened up for me and became my favorite of theirs, and I got back on board with everything they’d go on to do.

I also reconnected with the next three albums (and I think Murderer is arguably the best song they ever did), but overall those are still the three I feel least affinity for. They each have incredible highs but they also contain songs that are among my least favorites.

By “the next three” I mean Trust, GD, and D&G