Five Lows
When I first got into indie rock, I knew so little about it (or anything else) that I would sometimes pool my lawnmowing money to buy a new album based only on the echo the band’s name made in the empty cave of my imagination. That’s how I first came across Low’s “I Could Live in Hope,” on cassette. On the cover: a peculiar faded orange-yellow, a vague child, a blank piece of paper.
I expected angular jangle, or murky punk, something cool, something from the non-suburban wider world, even it didn’t end up being something I would actually listen to. What came out of the tinny car stereo as we pulled out of the mall parking lot were haunted nursery rhymes, lullabies underwater, alien hymns.
As I started to listen to indie rock more and more, it became important to know things, to understand music not only as something to love but also something to master. I was once mortified when, after I commented to the cool record-store-person that “on the new Low, they hold the notes for a really long time,” she said “of course,” because saying the obvious truth out loud missed the point.
Low’s aloofness and distinctiveness was always cool, and, I hoped, evidence of being cool. But there is something profoundly and even unpleasantly earnest about them. They didn’t hold the notes for a long time to be different; they held the notes for a really long time because that was the song.
It’s impossible to really think about Low and not acknowledge the serious, searching, religious, Christian Mormon imagination of their songs, and not merely occasionally in the lyrics, but in the experience of the music itself, in its core of loneliness, wonder and fear. Listening to Low can feel like you yourself are standing alone in the center of an empty field of snow, singing. Their “Silent Night” is about an actual silent night. The spare, repetitive melodies and words are chosen with such care that they illuminate the surrounding silences. “The Lamb”’s Christ/Joseph Smith sings: “you see black and I see shadows” — a description of complete darkness as evidence of a great light.
Loud guitar Low is an insistence on the possible gentleness of noise.
As the years have passed, Low have added to their original minimalist guitar chime not only more jagged guitar but further new sounds and tones: loops and clicks, drones, statics, distortions. The paradox is that the more earth and glitter are layered over, the more the song is scratched and damaged, the stronger is the shape and essence of the superficially obscured hymn. The way a broken ancient statue is more alive than one that is brand new. The way, even in the overfilled exhausted buzzing disenchanted adult world, a pure moment of song can return to you the fresh experience of experiencing music for the first time. But I don’t feel nostalgia listening to Low. I feel an opening up.
