1. Will The Night
2. Condescend
3. Born By The Wires
4. Be There
5. Landlord
6. Hey Chicago
Low’s I Could Live In Hope is one of my perrenial favorites, an album I tend to forget even exists until something reminds me of it, at which point I’ll spend a few days absolutely devouring it. They’re like a gloomier, more sparse Red House Painters. Like Slint, they showcase the emotional depth minimalism and sparse, calculated notes can have. Unlike Slint, they rely on strong vocal melodies and harmonies instead of mostly amelodic spoken word.
There’s a pretty strong difference between the sort of emotional punch these different styles of delivery offer. With spoken word, there’s no necessary continuity, no guarantee or expectation. Every syllable feels calculated and deliberate. Once you add a strong vocal melody, the vocals themselves become necessary and expected, and can much more easily fade into the background. What they lack in de-facto emotional presence, they need to make up in melody. And Low has proven to master the art of somber, emotionally stirring, simple melodies.
I’ve always drawn association in my mind between slowcore – the semi-joke genre that artists like Red House Painters and Low fall into – and shoegaze. They seem to me to be two opposite approaches to the same fundamental idea. Shoegaze artists like My Bloody Valentine inundate the listener with walls and waves of heavy, simplistically melodic texture. Slowcore artists replace the lush textures with oppressive silence, while relying on the same sort of simplistic melodies. Both have a deliberately lo-fi approach to music that treats the texture of the sound as an important element of the music itself.
My one complaint with Low’s recordings, then, in general, is that unlike shoegaze, they don’t usually leave enough space for the listener to appreciate the subtleties of the sound. While shoegaze fills its gaps with swirling textures, slowcore is left with silence and softly decaying notes. Which is nice, but few albums are adventurous enough to explore this to its full potential, and I Could Live In Hope is no exception. Many of the songs feel slightly constrained, like they aren’t really given quite enough room to breathe. Their slow tempo gives them more than most, but there’s an potential for the abstract that’s lost in the pop sensibilities, and it begs to be explored.
Enter Songs For A Dead Pilot. This is the first Low release on Kranky, who list among their catalog several Stars of the Lid albums and Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s breathtaking F#A#∞, and who tend to specialize in experimental and ambient music.
A good EP makes me ecstatic. To me, the best EPs are cohesive experiments in style that would possibly be too tiresome for an entire CD. An album length Songs For A Dead Pilot would be tedious to get through. But at around 35 minutes, it doesn’t get old or monotonous in a single sitting. The songs explore various levels of ambience, from the intense glowing cathedral reverb of Will the Night to breathtaking, droning Born By The Wires, more soundscape than song, dominated by tension and the visceral beauty of chords freely fading into silence, invigorating the more standard but still particularly ambient pieces the follow.
But if you’re like me, you don’t need or really want too much description. It’s Low being Low and also exploring more experimental forms, which was enough to get me hooked, and from that perspective it doesn’t disappoint. If you’re looking for something light and catchy you’re looking in the wrong place. At the same time, the darkness of Low’s music isn’t so much hopeless and depressive as it is melancholic and nostalgic. It’s quiet and pensive music, but it isn’t despairing.
But I’d like to take a minute to explore Born By The Wires, which is clearly the centerpiece of this album, in a bit more detail. The song begins with some semblence of standard melody, albeit in eerie unstable falsetto, sparse tension brimming just below the surface in the jarring, slightly discordant guitar strums, almost inaudible drum beats beneath. The result is unsettling and unsatisfactory, clearly going somewhere but defying any sort of satisfactory resolve, seeming to progress yet returning to the same place it was before, but with more gusto. It stays at this point, straddling the line between comfortable familiarity and uncomfortable uncertainty, for about six minutes, before dissolving into a sequence of powerful emotive strums that decay, slowly, into silence. Expressions that, despite their initial intensity, eventually subside.
The artist is working towards something concrete, but it refuses to be fully realized. The tension of the artist’s frustration swells below the surface until, finally, in a fit of resolve, the artist focuses his attention on just a single chord. Yet even that, despite the emotion and deliberation behind it, refuses to subsist and inevitably subsides. So he continues, with varying degrees of desperation, but the result is the same. When it finally holds, it’s a slow and resonant drone, capturing only the darkness of the artist’s frustration and none of the beauty of his original expression. This gives way, abruptly, to the nearly inaudible chiming of a music box. A simple, primitive melody, arising wholly disconnected from the fury that preceded it. The artist’s conscious intentions are futile in comparison to simple, uninvited inspiration. Or maybe the catharsis of the track itself gives way to peaceful serenity. Interpret it however you like, or just bask in its somber reverbations.
I feel guilty linking to any tracks here since Kranky already provides three of them on their website. The three tracks posted – Will The Night, Condescend, and Be There – are a good representation of the album as a whole. Also, a quick search tells me that Born by the Wires is streaming in full over on last.fm, so you can check that out as well.
Maybe next time I’ll finally get to Swans. Maybe.
