I never used to like books all that much when I was in my teenage years. I found it hard to sit down and hold my concentration for something where action revolved around someone else's ideas. I had my own ideas, my own idealized view of how stories progressed and how I wanted them to progress. What I didn't understand was progression. At some point in my mind, I was devaluing the idea that anyone else could stimulate my impetus for learning (unless of course I had to write a paper on something).
Much in the same way, I was caught on instantaneous hooks and straightforwardness in music. Getting older should be quick to explain. Love should only boil down to feelings for each other. Good and evil are an easily identifiable pair of forces. In fact, if I couldn't identify with those forces or the style in which they have been presented, I have no time for your music.
I was completely unimpressed with Low early in my music's burgeoning. I thought they were a formless mass—a motionless heap of ideas I didn't care about. I didn't see them as a stylized force because they don't present themselves as such. Take Drums and Guns, the newest offering. Their slow, building to nothing approach is still the correct approach to their assailable lyricism, but I only now understand how this is a viable technique. Their last album was a perfect transition piece—slow and fast songs meshed together with their crafty wordplay and brutal honesty made for the new fan (like myself) and revved the engines of the older fans to enjoy their progression. It added a face to their name. I no longer thought of them as this faceless pair of melancholic bores, but as a pair of melancholic powerhouses.
Now, reviewing this album, I am completely enveloped in each seemingly incomplete song. The stoic stand in Sandinista, the cull to admission in Dragonfly and pretty people, the gravity of Belarus all form a shape around the listener. The togetherness and fluidity of each musical movement are formless in their repetition and allow the lyrical force and meandering vocal melodies to improvise and experiment until perfected. And that is just it—I think this is as close to perfection as Low will get. Unlike past albums, the shape taken around the listener is one of importance—each story is not a ghost or a shell of a story as I always thought of them before. Instead of piecemeal and overtly cold, I feel included and warm inside a home built by a band at the peak of performance. This album is a mechanical perfection and an invitation rather than a stylized and purposeful exclusion; not a vanity project but an understanding reached with the listener.
Maturity is a strange beast, but it rears its head into strange places. Drums and Guns is not a call to arms for Low but for their audience. If you don't get this, maybe you don't want to evolve. Maybe you have decided to accept your points as the final admission of truth. That makes sense. Low just doesn't fit. I was in that camp a few years ago, and I remember it fondly. I still revisit every now and again when I stubbornly refuse to listen to new things. All I mean to say is, Low has opened up in this album more so than in any other and it may benefit a larger audience than usually expected. I've learned to let go of my typicality and for the sake of musical accomplishment, perhaps other can too. |