"The future is prisms and math," Alan Sparhawk sings on "Death of a Salesman", one of the few successful tracks from The Great Destroyer. Any English professor will tell you it's dangerous to conflate an author with his narrator, but in this case, there are parallels to draw. Think of the prism as this statement from the band's online bio (written circa Secret Name): "Low is a trio from Duluth, Minnesota, who make very slow music. That's not the only thing there is to their music, or even the most important thing, but it's what you'll notice first." Anyone that's listened to myopic negative criticism of the group knows this all too well.
The bio goes on to note that there's more to Low music than narcoleptic tempos; indeed, you'd have to be tone-deaf or stubborn to listen to Secret Name or Songs From a Dead Pilot and not realize that. Still, the stereotype remains-- as do expectations from fans of all stripes, whether the band wants to cop to them or not. Most importantly, there's the expectations that the band has of themselves; over the past decade, the group has shown a willingness to buck convention and follow their muse wherever it leads. Unfortunately, it sounds like they've been lead astray. In other words (again, from "Death of a Salesman"): "I forgot all my songs/ The words now are wrong/ And I burned my guitar in a rage".
This forgetful rage is exemplified by "Everybody's Song", one of the album's many missteps. On this song, the group rocks out-- Sparhawk breaks out the Spinal Tap amp, Mimi Parker pummels her snare and high-hat, and Zak Sally...well, Zak doesn't have to change his approach too much, though he might be plucking his bass strings with more force than usual. On top of this mess are those patented gorgeous two-part harmonies, uncharacteristically straining to make themselves heard over the racket. And that's what this track amounts to-- a big ball of racket, crass and boorish, full of the sound and fury that don't amount to much. More importantly, it goes against everything that Low does successfully.
Don't take my word for it, though. According to Low, "they play songs stripped to their bare essentials: slow tempos, quiet voices, powerful lyrics, and minimal instrumentations." You'd think that a song following that plan of attack would be a smashing success, or-- at the very least-- a bit better than this Marshall Stacked stuff. Instead, they end up with a song bastard naysayers can use as Hater's Exhibit A in the case of Why Low Is No Good. "Broadway (So Many People)", an interminable seven-minute track, takes its sweet time alternating between bored lead-footed strumming and waning echoed ambiance before giving way to a cloying coda that aims for "pretty" but ends up well in the rough.
The rest of the album consists of various extrapolations of Low's sound with varying degrees of success. "Monkey", the lead-off track, is what "Everybody's Song" would be with just a smidge of restraint, a better sense of dynamics, and some self-awareness. Following that is "California", probably the best pop song the group's ever recorded (with the meta-aware "Just Stand Back" and the peppy Spector homage "Walk Into the Sea" finishing close behind). On the other hand, there are Low-by-numbers tracks like "On the Edge Of" (working the quiet/loud trick like a broken light switch) and over-wrought slabs like "Step" (complete with vocal effects, piano taps, hand claps, and children's vocals all drunkenly stumbling into each other), where the busy hands of producer Dave Fridmann still end up doing the Devil's work.
Erring on the side of minimal instrumentation would have done this record a world of good. "Cue the Strings" would play out beautifully as just Mimi & Alan set against a sea of feedback, but the invasive metronomic beat and the fake strings (popping in on cue) muddy the waters; the all tension/no release moves of "Pissing" is the slightly more successful flip side to "Everybody's Song" and its all release/no tension MO; "Silver Rider" pays too much attention to its own edict ("Sometimes your voice is not enough") and adds just enough bells and whistles-- a timpani drum here, a buried looped vocal there, some acoustic picking sprinkled throughout-- to upset the song's balance; "When I Go Deaf" works fine as a quiet acoustic number but loses a bit of its emotional heft when the full band comes in and the guitar tech plugs in Sparhawk's Flying V.
"The future is prisms and math." So let's crunch some numbers: Low's been an ongoing concern for over a decade. The Great Destroyer is their 8th album, and 12th full-length release. They've recorded enough songs during the course of their career to fill a three-CD box set with a set of 52 songs that barely overlaps what's available on their full-lengths. And never mind the number of tours and shows and hours logged in countless studios. I mention all this because of the intriguing subtext permeating most of these songs. It's in the song titles--"Death of a Salesman", "When I Go Deaf", "Cue The Strings", "Walk Into The Sea". It's in the lyrics--"never sing that song again," "the march is over/ The great destroyer/ She passes through you like a knife," "Yeah, time's a great destroyer/ It leaves every child a bastard." And, most tellingly, on "Just Stand Back": "I could turn on you so fast/ I'll just cut you in the end." Sounds like they're cutting bait and heading back to shore.
You can imagine a wry smirk on Alan's face when he sings: "It's a hit/ It's got soul/ Steal the show/ With your rock'n'roll". It's a wry encapsulation of a band that's made a point (up until now) to forgo convention, instead setting off to discover a new dialect in an old language. This line could easily serve as an epithet, or an epitaph. And maybe this is a death, and The Great Destroyer is Low themselves, orphaning their fans and their history for the sake of the group's creative edification. If this album is indeed the beginning of a long, arduous journey of rediscovery and rebirth and other fun ponderous stuff, here's hoping the rest of the trip is more enjoyable than this initial misstep.
