Low will always be considered the quintessential slowcore band, but their real mastery, and the secret to their decades-long vitality, lies in something more intangible than tempo. They have a preternatural mastery of arrangement and dynamics, an instinct for when and how to pick the exact right moment to lift the volume a bit, to accent a repetitive moment with this synth line or that fuzzed guitar. The steady pace and the melancholy atmospherics are important, but without their keen ear for detail, the music would simply be a haze.
Admittedly, Low’s last album The Invisible Way, produced by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and released in 2013, could have benefited from a few more of those lively punctuations. But it seems as though the fallout from that experience woke the band up, and Ones and Sixes is a far more interesting record for it. To create their new one, the members retreated deep into rural Wisconsin with producer BJ Burton and recorded at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Eau Claire. It’s hard to tell what might have triggered it, but the band hasn’t sounded this lively in years; maybe not since its Sub Pop debut The Great Destroyer from a decade ago.
The opening track "Gentle" is a discomfiting funeral dirge that sets an unnerving mood early on. The instrumentation combines static-y bits of industrial percussion with rich, elegant keyboard accents, as Mimi Parker’s near-falsetto flutters in and out, sometimes multi-tracked and sometimes padded out with as much reverb as can conceivably be applied. The song's verses feel like free-associative jumbles of words like, "gentle, battle, torture, stable and silence", underscoring the song's fitful, uneasy energy.
That mood settles into the album, which otherwise doesn't offer dramatic shifts. Airy, luscious backing vocals and sparse, gritty instrumentation remain the mainstay of Low’s sound, and they are used to wondrous effect on the nearly 10-minute long penultimate track "Landslide". But there’s a real immediacy and liveliness to Alan Sparhawk's vocals and playing there that’s been missing from the group’s more recent records. His singing is so full and present on songs like "Spanish Translation" and "Lies" that it feels like a renewed bid for your undivided attention. And as much as they are able to make a conventional "pop" song then "No End" is it. For all intents and purposes it’s a pretty standard, under three-minute, get-in and get-out love song, and based on the words alone, a very treacly one at that: "I couldn’t wait to come back through/ To you." Not exactly a left-turn, but a welcome, additional flavor.
Most bands don’t have either the stamina or the creative drive to make it up to and past the 20-year mark. The ones that do rarely find new things to say. As its enters its third decade making music, Low has reached a comfortable but engaging stride creating music that consistently seems to be at odds with itself. Ones and Sixes is all at once beautiful, ugly, tense, warm, inviting and repellent. It’s an emotional and sonic juggling act where even the slightest bum-note would draw attention to itself. As always with Low, the beauty is all about the details.
