Sept. 08--Don't let the gentle demeanor fool you. Low's music tends to be typecast as slow and quiet, but the typecasters couldn't be more wrong. Slow, maybe, but there's often something profoundly disquieting about the songs. Even within the sparest of settings, this trio from northern Minnesota contains multitudes, and the undertow is particularly treacherous in "Ones and Sixes" (Sub Pop).
Returning to some of the stylistic inroads made on its 2007 album "Drums and Guns," Low builds a framework out of electronic static and subterranean feedback. The bass tones evoke the trunk-rattling of contemporary hip-hop. The opening song is called "Gentle," but it's a deception. Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker and Steve Garrington enter as if their boots are crunching through ice-encrusted snow drifts. Voices wash in and out like aural ghosts transmitted from between stations on a radio dial. A guitar strums off and on, an abstract sound independent of the song.
"You know we should have seen it coming," Sparhawk sings on "No Comprende," as ruefulness, regret and exasperation mingle. Spaghetti Western guitars and reverberating snare-drum hits suggest a reckoning is at hand. The track bleeds into the next, "Spanish Translation," in which the omnipresent noise that bubbles beneath many of these tracks surfaces, recedes and returns, like a stalker in a dark alleyway.
The white-noise hum foreshadows the menace lurking in Parker's lullaby voice on "Congregation." Sparhawk frequently brings an edge to his conversational vocals, but Parker can usually be counted on to provide a soothing balm. Not so here. "Incarceration creeps up from behind," she sings, which in many ways sums up the way these disconcerting melodies seep into the subconsciousness and take out a room for months at a time.
In another track, over industrial clang, her sweet vibrato sounds the alarm: "All you innocents make a run for it." The album rarely shouts. It wrestles with the idea that true self-knowledge reveals itself slowly, and -- as suggested by the nine-minute "Landslide" -- it sometimes arrives too late to save the relationships we most value.
"Ones and Sixes"
Low
3 stars (out of 4)
greg@gregkot.com
