Press and Radio
Rake Magazine
American Gothic
Chris Godfrey
American Gothic [January 2005] by Chris Godsey After a decade of restraint, Low explodes.
For ten years, Low's music has seethed with quiet rural rage-the undercurrent of emotional tension that hums in austere Midwestern places, among people whose deeper feelings are seldom expressed. From the band's home base on Duluth's Central Hillside, it has built an international cult following for creating rock music that's intelligent, intense, ambient, and awesomely slow. Low concerts are contemplative and quiet-a single guitar or vocal tone might resonate alone for minutes-and dedicated fans demand absolute silence. Try to talk while you should be listening, and you'll get glared at, even shushed. Typical Low album and show reviews rely on northern Minnesota's winter landscape-all gray skies and gloom-as the band's putative muse, with writers summoning metaphors involving frozen lakes, frigidity, and long, dark nights.
Every song title on the band's first record, 1994's I Could Live in Hope, is a single syllable grim with portent. The album sleeve reads like an impressionistic poem about what happens to repressed emotion in a northern town-loaded words like "Fear," "Cut," "Drag," "Rope"-while the songs themselves are long, emotionally brutal, and sparse. And the lyrics! "You're gonna need more," Alan Sparhawk sings on "Rope." "Don't ask me to kick any chairs out from under you."Every song title on the band's first record, 1994's I Could Live in Hope, is a single syllable grim with portent. The album sleeve reads like an impressionistic poem about what happens to repressed emotion in a northern town-loaded words like "Fear," "Cut," "Drag," "Rope"-while the songs themselves are long, emotionally brutal, and sparse. And the lyrics! "You're gonna need more," Alan Sparhawk sings on "Rope." "Don't ask me to kick any chairs out from under you."
Themes like illness and medication, water, breath, family, and regret have run in cycles throughout Low's albums; anger, more measured than understated, has been constant. "Fear of God and a disappointing father / holds the hand around your neck," Sparhawk and Mimi Parker sing on the strummy, sunny-sounding "La la la Song," from 2003's Trust. On the menacing "John Prine," from the same record, Sparhawk coos darkly, "I thought I was a poet / I had so much to say / but now I want to see the blood / I want to make them pay," while Zak Sally wields his bass like a bludgeon. Until Trust, the anger was mostly oblique, couched in cryptic lyrics and ominous arrangements. Sometimes it was barely hidden behind an ironic, almost sentimental facade, as in Grant Wood's American Gothic or Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz." Themes like illness and medication, water, breath, family, and regret have run in cycles throughout Low's albums; anger, more measured than understated, has been constant. "Fear of God and a disappointing father / holds the hand around your neck," Sparhawk and Mimi Parker sing on the strummy, sunny-sounding "La la la Song," from 2003's Trust. On the menacing "John Prine," from the same record, Sparhawk coos darkly, "I thought I was a poet / I had so much to say / but now I want to see the blood / I want to make them pay," while Zak Sally wields his bass like a bludgeon. Until Trust, the anger was mostly oblique, couched in cryptic lyrics and ominous arrangements. Sometimes it was barely hidden behind an ironic, almost sentimental facade, as in Grant Wood's American Gothic or Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz."
Kids are naturally curious, no matter where they grow up, and hungry minds in small towns often starve. Small-town kids may not know exactly what they're missing, but they know they're missing it. Once radio, television, magazines, and the Web have tantalized them with the surreal worlds of Paris, New York, Minneapolis-even, for some, Duluth-they have no choice but to confront just how deeply their hometowns suck.
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