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CMJ
The Great Destroyer
Kory Grow
For over a decade, Low's Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker have unapologetically encompassed everything rock 'n' roll ain't: they're married, they're Mormon, they're parents (they're proud) and they play slow with minimal percussion, sublty coloring a larger picture. On The Great Destroyer, Low plays louder, faster (meaning slightly below a walking pace) and fuller, as the group explores new ways to subtly embed its real-life emotions in what could be the group's most widely accessible and most touching disc. Since the trio's debut, Low has (slowly) expanded its sound, without compromising its nominal instrumentation (guitar, bass, snare, tom, cymbal). Sparhawk turns his amp up for "On The Edge Of," creating warm ripples of reverberant fuzz that fade when he and Parker drape their voices delicately around the song's title in perfect harmony. Sparhawk sings the disc's most telling song, "Death Of A Salesman," by himself-narrating each crushing defeat as his character trades in his creativity and his guitar for middle class mediocrity, but with the satisfaction that "the kids are all fed." That mediocrity, that compromising of one's own virtues, that unwillingness to grow is, without a doubt, The Great Destroyer. And Low, will have none of it.
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