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Things We Lost In The Fire Low Kranky Records, 2001
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Reviewed by Ian Grey
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I recently saw Low perform in New York City. The audience was a niche marketer's nightmare: academics, goths, moms and dads, punks, students, musos, blacks and whites. (I'm tempted to add "dogs and cats" but NYC building codes prevent animals from attending even the most superlative shows.) After an hour plus of the trio performing -- among other songs -- selections from their delicately astonishing new CD, Things We Lost in the Fire, this multi-everything, been-there-done-that New York assemblage were reduced to a muted state of stunned awe. "In thrall" comes to mind as well. Tears, I kid you not, were evident. Low, comprised of guitarist/vocalist Alan Sparhawk, trés minimal drummer/vocalist Mimi Parker (together with Sparhawk since high school and now married, both Mormons) and bassist Zak Sally (single, agnostic), play terrific, but (until now) very, very slow music that rewards attention with a singular sort of beauty. Their sense of the divine alone separates Low from the spiritually bankrupt and musically homogenized pre-fab freakshow of post-corporate pop-anti-culture. But despite this secular pedigree, few Low songs get overtly Christian (or Mormon) about things. Still, there is in the Duluth, Minnesota-based band's music a savory whiff of the nonspecifically liturgical. A sense that the Everly Brothers (and an Everly wife) got trapped at St. Vincent's and took advantage of the superior acoustics to create the most soul-tingling harmonies ever. That works for me. And it works better on Things We Lost in the Fire than on any other Low recording, as utterly terrific as they are in their own rights. This is Low hitting their Sgt. Pepper-level stride (another possibly arrogant comparison can be found in this same piece), minus any unseemly pretensions or thematic overreach. Recordist Steve "producer of Nirvana" Albini eschews his usual minimalism approach for this oft-accused minimalist trio and perhaps inadvertently parodies his own bare-bones reputation: mellotrons, tape loops, strings, horns and sundry Strange Noises punctuate, embroider and add dramatic/and or mysterioso heft to this superb recording. And as for those harmonies between Sparhawk's tremulous, slightly-disturbed boy tenor and Parker's Midwestern Gothic alto with its inhumanly (angelic?) vibrato -- well, it's a terrific argument for marriage. Low have been around for about nine years. At first, they were all about "less." Tempos clocked in at about 60 BPM, songs had titles like "Shame," "Violence," and, taking shorthand to an extreme, "Anon." Reference points for their sound can be gleaned from Joy Division and the Velvets. But from the git-go, Low transcended their antecedents, operating in a reverberant space that, using rock critic algebra, could be equated as being akin to a mixture of Eno's "Another Green World" as played by Tom Verlaine and remixed by the strange hive-spirit of the films of David Lynch. Like most accounts of The Supreme Being Him/Herself, Low has always been about what isn't, or rather, what doesn't seem to be there. The emptiness between the elegiacally-paced notes, the tension between the stroke of Parker's cymbal and a long-awaited snare brush, the vast implications of a chord that's strummed, and then held, driving the listener crazy for resolution, which usually appears as a sort of musical redemption when it finally is resolved. But this aesthetic has now evolved from something category-obsessives have called "slo-core" to something that is, in the best sense possible, uncategorizable. So what can a person expect when they acquire Things We Lost in the Fire? Well, attempting to describe non-generic music is a fool's errand, but here goes: "Whore": Wherein dueling campfire melodies, a sort-of Fripp-ish fuzz bass and lyrics dealing with spiritual servitude combine to create, of all things, a new "Hey Jude." "Laser Bean": One vibrato guitar, one chilling Parker vocal. There's a hint of Appalachian longing in his effortless octave-shifts, but there's something else, something well-nigh uncanny in the emotions raised. You've never felt the feelings evoked by this lullaby-gone-strange. At least, one hopes, not alone. "Medicine Magazines": Again, the closest harmonies this side of death. Or life. Vast, reverberant minimal piano, an unexpected, jaw-droppingly gorgeous descending chord shift, sublime. "Dinosaur Act": The first, for lack of a better word, Low "rock" song. Downright frisky by the band's standards, with a semi-power chord riff, but also with a heartwrecking brass ensemble section and the possibility of being a Top 10 favorite, if only in a better world. "In Metal": Wherein Parker -- who recently gave birth to a son -- meditates on the not-often-stated urge to keep one's child a child forever, and, in this case, "in metal." Perverse, true, gorgeous. And six more songs I can't even attempt to describe properly. Every instrument, every word and instrumental gesture is calculated for universal, trend-averse impact. While the cello and mellotron embroideries of, respectively, "Like a Forest" and "July," show an arguable Beatles influence, they do not amount to a slavish homage to Beatles minutiae. Rather, the particulars of the Beatles style have become an intrinsic part of the pop vocabulary: like any other bit of language, they can be applied in the support of a song without necessarily turning the song into something one can label as a Beatles rip. The point is, everything on this recording exists in an essentially hermetic universe that can be heard in no other form on any other CD. But this uniqueness results in the diametric opposite of being impenetrable, obtuse or exclusionary. Rather, with no distracting appropriations, Low's music is both more accessible than ever and attains something that's as close to intentional "purity" as is possible. Which underscores the universal topics of their lyrics' assorted psychological/spiritual struggles. This makes Things We Lost In The Fire one of the few beautiful and sure things in an ever-increasingly dull and iffy world. | April 2001 Ian Grey's work has been published in Time Out, Icon, Fangoria and many other periodicals. 1998 saw the publication of his book, Sex, Stupidity and Greed: Inside the American Movie Industry (JunoBooks). He is currently at work on an epic novel dealing with sex, pop music, family and mass murder, based on two lines from a mediocre Depeche Mode song. Mr. Grey likes to think that he will be among the very first to do this. |
The point is, everything on this recording exists in an essentially hermetic universe that can be heard in no other form on any other CD. But this uniqueness results in the diametric opposite of being impenetrable, obtuse or exclusionary. Rather, with no distracting appropriations, Low's music is both more accessible than ever and attains something that's as close to intentional "purity" as is possible. |
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