Skip to main content

Low review – a hotline to paranoia, discomfort and sorrow

Tramway, Glasgow
The Minnesotan trio blend their recent electronic experimentation into their brutally beautiful aesthetic, offsetting despair with sweetness

It has been hailed by some critics as the masterpiece of Low’s 26-year career, yet 2018’s Double Negative ought to present the Duluth, Minnesota slowcore indie-rock lifers with a dilemma. How will they recreate the sound of their most adventurous record to date – a product of studio-as-instrument experimentation, a harshly textural triumph constructed with dolorous drones, raw static hiss, ragged noise and swirling electronic bass whomps – live in concert?

Unfazed guitarist and vocalist Alan Sparhawk, his drummer and vocalist wife Mimi Parker and bassist Steve Garrington render opener Always Up – the cautiously optimistic centerpiece of Double Negative – with a tender clinch of softly beaten toms, crunching distortion and harmonies so close it’s as if they’re fastened with Velcro. Low have never been a band likely to break out synths, drum pads and sequencers all of a sudden. They blend Double Negative in among their wider oeuvre and aesthetic, performing selections from their previous 11 albums under its brutally beautiful spell. Played out before a seated, pin-drop silent audience in the shadows of a theatre that is scarcely lit, this is a set shrouded in atmosphere. Low get lower.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2sXnxqo

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more