For The Great Destroyer, their 2005 Sub Pop debut (and 7th album overall), Low quickened their paces and rustled up a new sound. Producer Dave Fridmann helped out in '05 and is back for Drums and Guns, Low's 2007 follow up, a return to pre- Great Destroyer form. Slowing down again and training the musical lamps on Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk's austere voices, the trio sets a decidedly somber tone (the album's opening line, delivered with pregnant pauses: "All soldiers, they're all gonna die/And all the little babies, they're all gonna die" and album-closing song titles: "Murderer" and "Violent Past"). Parker and Sparhawk's voices enchant eerily, a whiff of electonica here and a haunted handclap there melding with Matt Livingston's bass to give the music some dark, gorgeous machine undertones--stark, martial, and noise-brushed at once. Fridmann finds all kinds of places to add tone, color and sound, keeping the tempos slow and the mood hypnotic. This is the art that wartime breeds. --Andrew Bartlett
Review by Heather Phares
A stark retreat from the relatively sunny sound of The Great Destroyer, Drums and Guns is, as its title suggests, inspired by the war in Iraq. True to the spirit of Low's other work, the outrage and regret expressed by these songs is just as timeless as it is timely, lamenting that war still exists as much as it addresses this particular war. And, while Drums and Guns' emotions and lyrics are complex (and on songs like "Murderer," with its "seems like you could use another fool," they don't pull any punches), its sound is often devastatingly spare and simple. It's almost hard to believe that the band worked with David Fridmann on this album as well as The Great Destroyer -- where that album was lush and overflowing with sonic tangents, Drums and Guns' sound is raw and restricted to just a few key sounds that underscore its themes. Fittingly, most of the album emphasizes percussion; whether it's the martial-yet-jazzy beat that drives "Sandinista" or the somber, almost industrial thud of "Dragonfly," this approach keeps the songs intimate, powerful, and uniquely modern-sounding. Organ also plays a key role on Drums and Guns, particularly on "Breaker," where it magnifies the anguish of lyrics like "my hand just kills and kills," and "Violent Past," where its massive sound closes the album by swallowing the listener in a cathedral of distortion. Aside from this song and the similarly epic "In Silence," most of Drums and Guns is gently but insistently tense, like a nagging conscience: "Take Your Time"'s looped church bells and "Belarus"' ghostly harmonies are bleakly, uncompromisingly beautiful. Low lightens up a little on the album's middle stretch, with "Hatchet," a plea for peace that's surprisingly playful ("let's bury the hatchet like the Beatles and the Stones"), and "Dust on the Window," where Mimi Parker's sweet voice sounds inherently comforting even as she wonders, "where can a girl get a meal?" Despite these bright spots, this is easily -- and understandably -- Low's darkest album since Trust. Unlike that album, however, Drums and Guns never feels dragged down by its weighty subject matter. It's a lean, potent work, and even if it's not one of Low's most superficially pleasant collections of songs, it's certainly among their most necessary ones.
Low
Drums and Guns
[Sub Pop; 2007]
Rating: 8.1
Many bands maintain longevity through versatility-- shifting, maturing, or updating their sounds as years and trends pass. Low couldn't have been more unlikely candidates for a lengthy career when they appeared in 1993, but several years of their single-minded adherence to patience and grace was a welcome reaction to the louder, heavier music dominating the early 90s rock charts and airwaves. It's understandable if that sound defines the group for its dedicated fans; aside from personal attachment, it recalls a time when mediocre rock radio was all we had to rebel against.
But for Low, in 2007, there's so much more at stake. The title itself sounds like a call to arms, but the band has skirted the idea that Drums and Guns is a political record; most of its key lyrics are ambiguous enough to stand in for personal torment as well as social unrest. It's a little easier to assigning the former to Drums and Guns, knowing that since The Great Destroyer (a critically divisive and uncharacteristic record for the band in its own right), Low lost their longtime bassist Zak Sally, and their frontman, Alan Sparhawk, has had a nervous breakdown, recorded a vocal-less solo record that's wildly experimental compared to Low, and spent a goodly chunk of time fronting the far more rock-oriented Retribution Gospel Choir (sometimes partnered with Red House Painters' Mark Kozelek).
Considering the mixed reception to the rocking The Great Destroyer, you'd think the band would return to their signature sound. You'd be wrong. Hardcore fans have heard more than half of Drums and Guns' songs played in Retribution Gospel Choir's guitar-driven context (as well as the understated "Dragonfly" in the band's recent live sets, and "Murderer" from a rare 10" single), and would assume these songs lean further in the direction of that side project and Great Destroyer; they'd be wrong as well. Drums and Guns tears at these already road-tested songs, leaving them as nothing but spine and sinew, with only the barest traces of what made them Low in the first place-- namely, the fragile and beautiful two-part harmonies. A promo sticker came with this record, saying, "I'm sick to death of LOW." It's easy to picture those words coming directly from Spawhawk.
But there's more career summation here than you'd think, from the nihilism and legacy-toying of Great Destroyer, to the brave production on their Songs for a Dead Pilot EP, to even weirder corners of the catalog: "Belarus" sounds like something from Low's oft-ignored remix record, with a lovely harmony that highlights Mimi Parker's vocals while simple bells, chimes and sampled strings burrow in the background-- enchanting, but about as far from Low as you can imagine. Drums and Guns even bears influence from Sparhawk's recent Solo Guitar record: "Pretty People" buzzes ominously, as Sparhawk wails some fairly obvious warnings before ending abruptly once a drum hits and a guitar chord sounds. "Dragonfly" has barely any instrumentation, just a clanging feedback loop; with its slow-burning swooning vocals about pills and shortened life cycles, it'd be a difficult song to tarnish in any cast. The track brings the same brutal chills of the highlights from Trust, but gets there only on the drama from Sparhawk's sour vocal turn and Parker's gentle accompaniment, and without the band's trademark perpetual reverb.
Mostly, the record is marked by a preponderance of basic, almost flimsy drum loops. Oh my, are there loops on this record. Songs like "Breaker" build from a basic beat to nothing more than handclaps and a one-finger organ drones, with a pinched multi-tracked harmony from Sparhawk who laments "our bodies break/ And the blood just spills and spills," and "there's gotta be an end to that." It's one of the most glaring examples on Drums and Guns of hard-panned vocals located almost entirely in the right channel, but after hearing the track enough times, it ceases to be a distraction, and it ends up one of the most striking examples of their stripped-down approach.
I doubt Low fans who've held on this long will rebel against these new textures, more the way they're employed-- the band has added an almost disconcerting levity, and subtracted the gentleness. The less said about the jaunty funk bass and busier loops of "Always Fade" and "Hatchet" the better; the latter is at least a mid-record palette-cleanser. It's this mode of Low that's the hardest to get used to; they sounding less sparse and more glib and underdeveloped, lost in uncharted territory. Parker, thankfully more present here than on recent records, gets "Dust on the Window" to herself, and its dusky balladry is a high point in a difficult middle section. Sequencing does threaten to kill this record, though there's ropes to old fans and frustrated listeners later in the album. "Take Your Time" is a dip into the pathos of previous Low records, even using church bells to further dampen the dirge. Should this not be enough for alienated fans, try to take comfort in the seven other albums that came before. There's a point at which a consistent sound is no longer a virtue. "Your Poison" shows us what Low would sound like as Guided By Voices; we don't need it. Once you're approaching double digits in album output, your records should actually do something to change status quo and justify their release, or at the very least spark some shred of interest in new listeners with the band's back catalog.
Should those listeners make it to the re-recorded "Murderer", then Drums and Guns will have accomplished both. The original EP from which "Murderer" was taken was Low at their most stark and dramatic; this version stands up ably to the first (as opposed to the unfortunate recut of "Silver Rider" from Great Destroyer), adding an insistent 4/4 bass pulse as well as a subtle guitar loop that works as an effective earworm, and a martial drumbeat that underlines the lyrics and serves the album's theme. The same goosebumps arise from as the lyrics rise from creepy insinuation to a protagonist's sneering confrontation with his maker ("Don't act so innocent/ I've seen you pound your fist into the Earth/ And I've read your books"), though this time with a new, understated urgency instead of just straining melodrama.
Drums and Guns ends on "Violent Past", beginning with another particularly ambiguous lyric: "All I can do is fight, even if I know you're right." It could be a call to arms or a mantra for struggling with personal demons-- either way, it sounds almost futile among the organs that bleed distortion and clamoring percussion, with the lyrics pondering how we've come this far before deciding with a shrug, "maybe it's your violent past." You could call the whole of the album resigned, but it still sounds determinedly so, the voice of one band against the world-- not too far off from where Low started.
-Jason Crock, March 15, 2007
|
