Friday 15 April 2011

Album Review: Low - C'mon


[Sub Pop, 2011]

Low have been around for a very long time. One of the first bands to break out from the slowcore subgenre in the early 1990s, they have since made 8 albums that have followed roughly the same blueprint - beautiful downtempo hymn-like backing instrumentation covered in layers of some of the best vocal harmonies I've ever heard. Their music incorporates and almost post-rock feel and lays it over conventional song structures. Despite the fact that they have essentially remained the same for 20 years, with only brief flirtations with faster stuff or with electronica on more recent albums, they have managed to completely avoid sounding tired or bereft of ideas in any way, mainly in my opinion because so few other bands are able to do what they do with anywhere near the same levels of success. There are a good few albums by them I'd class as genuinely brilliant, with the pick of the bunch being 2001's 'Things We Lost In The Fire', one of the best records of the last decade. They've only released one album since 2005, however, and even that was a bit of a mis-step for them. From the opening bars of 'Try To Sleep' it is obvious they've re-evaluated what made them good in the first place, and are fully back on song - husband-and-wife vocalists Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker soar together over a lovely twinkly glockenspiel backing with an intimacy that Low have rarely achieved since the release of 'Dinosaur Act' a decade ago.

The first half of the album is slightly quicker, slightly more rocky, than I expected from Low. It contains all the more radio-friendly songs, like 'Try To Sleep' and 'Witches', about Sparhawk's childhood fear of witches and, bizarrely, people who act like Al Green. The lyrics are harrowing, even without the stark instrumentation;

"One night I got up and told my father there were witches in my room
He gave me a baseball bat and said here's what you do
When you have finally submitted to embarrassing capture
Take out that baseball bat and show those witches some pasture"

The second side is what really makes the record. '$20' pushes the emotions slightly over-the-top, milking everything it possibly can from the vocals, but it still works well, and then Majesty/Magic and Nightingale push the builds and dynamics more to the fore, with the album finally reaching a climax in the second half of the epic 'Nothing But Heart' before a gradual build-down into the final track, the almost poppy (compared to the rest of Low's stuff, anyway) 'Something's Turning Over'.

The album feels incredibly inviting, despite the desperate feel, with everything from the title right through to the last track feeling like it is directly addressing the listener. Sparhawk described the album as a kind of tool for companionship in desperate circumstances - "I'm looking in your eyes right now, and we need to figure out how to get through the next moment, together, as human beings". To me, this feels like 'Things We Lost In The Fire' has matured, growing old gracefully. There is a lot less of the straight despair of that record, with it converted into a vague sense of unease that is occasionally dwarfed by overwhelming sadness (the height of this definitely coming in '$20'). I'd say this is my favourite Low album of the last decade, and my favourite downtempo album to be released by anyone in the last couple of years. It might even be the record that tips them from being a cult band to something approaching mainstream success.

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