Have LOW made a bad record? Any other band steadily releasing albums since the 90s would surely, surely! have made at least one mistake along the way. That’s normal. You’re allowed to have a bad one. It’s expected! Inevitable, even! And yet when I look back through LOW’s discography, the albums I listen to on repeat and the ones I go through every now and then, I can’t think of a single one that I would call bad. Are they the best band in the world because of that? Maybe! They’ve grown over the years, letting their sound evolve without losing touch with their core elements. Starting out as bastions of the ‘slowcore’ scene (though Sparhawk and Parker have both derided that name), LOW’s last – brilliant! mindblowing! – album ‘Double Negative’ marked a decisive new direction. Producer BJ Burton brought in buckets of distortion, pouring thick pools of violent noise over Sparhawk and Parker’s trademark harmonies. LOW went from slowcore champions to industrial noise-wranglers, and thirteenth album HEY WHAT exists very much within that. Third record with Burton and first since departure of bassist Steve Garrington, it’s a bold re-affirming of the new and simultaneously a progression within it, as the best-band-in-the-world show off a deep, unrivalled understanding of the form, pushing it even further than before.
The noise is back, baby! And more than ever LOW show off their ability to craft it. The distortion has a uniquely spatial quality on HEY WHAT. The electronic stabs on White Horses are kinetic, like you can see them pulsing in the air. The warped ripples on All Night – not unlike something you might hear on a Ratatat record – feel architectural, like alien structures in the mist. Since their early slow-core days Low’s instrumentation has had a grandness to it, painting a backdrop for Sparhawk and Parker’s vocal harmonies to emerge from. But what’s characterised both this record and the last is the brutality of that sound, the violence of it. Like an ocean, like a storm sucking everything into itself.
It’s possibly the feature that distinguishes HEY WHAT most clearly from their last record. Double Negative saw Sparhawk and Parker’s harmonies in tension with the noise. Their voices were desperate cries, ultimately drowning, distorted out beyond all recognition. But on HEY WHAT that conflict becomes synergy. The distortion behind the chorus in Days Like These stretches the vocal line out into gorgeous, digital transcendence. When they disintegrate in Hey the gesture feels co-operative, the words not drowning but garnering potency from the oceanic noise. It’s like they aren’t fighting anymore. They let the noise in, meld themselves with it, ride each new sonic structure like expert surfers on display. And sure, to my mind it means HEY WHAT doesn’t quite pack the same emotional punch as its predecessor, the tension loosening without that conflict which I found so affecting. But it is beautiful. And it makes sense in terms of the progression of one record to the next. It’s testament to their artistry.
Which is not to say that LOW have succumbed to an overly optimistic mood. As with their previous two releases, Sparhawk and Parker seem interested here in the looming impossibility of hope, the broken promise of salvation. Ideas of waiting recur sporadically, like constellations, re-grouping into different images. I Can Wait has faithful affirmations veering into despairing pleas, White Horses looks ahead to an uncertain future, caught between trepidation and galloping hope. It feels like an attempt to map the landscape of faith, to sonically plot its emotional co-ordinates. On Disappearing:
That disappearing horizon / It brings cold comfort to my soul / An ever-present reminder / The constant face of the unknown
The stark reality of how it feels to hold onto faith when all seems lost. It’s what makes LOW one of the most consistently brilliant bands around. Without any historical specificity to their lyrics each album feels as if capturing the exact sensation of the present moment that we’re in: the unique juncture of digital reality and political despondency.
And a lot of that comes from the structure of the thing, the listening experience from start to finish. They know how to sequence an album, how to tell a story. The dramaturgy is so tight it feels almost as if moving through a five-act structure, unspooling its themes as an emotional narrative. The positioning of Days Like These in the centre, the sonic and thematic core. Don’t Walk Away the heart-rending and achingly sad fourth act. And then More: act five climax. What an astonishing moment. One of those rare beats in an album which seem to retroactively make sense of the thing, which make you want to go back and listen again so as to reach that point.
I learned more than what they ever taught / They thought I could never pull it off
The act of faith finally as self-affirming gesture. Everything coheres at this point, vocal harmonies propelled, enervated by the heavy noise underneath. That proclaimed faith in one’s own self is thematic apotheosis here. What else is there to believe in in the face of overwhelming despair other than oneself? The religious overtones are still here, but the theology is Augustinian; the divine discovered within ourselves, affirmation of God as affirmation of our own being. You could take almost any LOW track and use it as a hymn and it would feel right. Because deep down their music, and HEY WHAT in particular, is an attempt to capture the act of reaching up that defines the religious mood. The desperate, yearning, impossible belief that there must be something more than this. That there must be something worth believing in, even when everything else is gone.
The final track as epilogue. In many ways a synecdoche for the album as a whole. The thing builds slowly, voices curling up in rising noise. There’s the waiting for something, the looking ahead, the dreading that moment of collapse. And then. Amongst it all. The sound of a simple, unadorned kick-drum. As if for the first time. A shard of sunlight through the fog. A touch of the real. It’s soon shrouded in noise, sucked up into that cloud, but it was there. ‘It must be wearing off’ they sing in the closing moments. And you can almost hear their weariness. To have faith is to lose it. Faith is an action, the action of striving, of constantly overcoming. It’s exhausting. But that glimmer remains, in their voices more than anything. To hope is to continue, always to continue. And so that is what we do.
vandal 