Time goes slow in Low Skies country, but the action certainly moves fast: Only 76 seconds into All the Love I Could Find, frontman Chris Salveter has already fallen in love with a stranger on a train-- and slit his throat. But then, as the Chicago backwoods balladeers' engrossing second album attests, dying is easy; it's the living and loving part that brings trouble.
The punchline to All the Love I Could Find is, unfortunately, "not a whole lot"-- and the love Salveter does find is only legal in certain Southern states. His absence-makes-the-heart-go-flounder despair is reflected in the band's skeletal arrangements, which assume the sunstroked stumble of Crazy Horse (c.f. "Cortez the Killer") and the Dirty Three's desert-dragging dirges. And standing in for Neil's signature one-note leads and Warren Ellis' weeping violin is an equally distressing instrument: Salveter's distinctive vocal, a death-bed confessional tremble that doesn't so much suggest a lump in his throat as a tumor.
Like his cow-punk patriarch Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Salveter is by turns petrified and cocksure, and never at a loss for sly, self-effacing witticisms: The solipsistic chorus to "You Can't Help Those People" at first sounds almost self-parodic ("Ain't nobody's troubles like mine/ I had no other girl on my mind/ The one I wanted was a crime"), but the smirks turn to shock as those words assume a more disturbing context next to "Cousin", a collaboration with Kelly Hogan that sympathetically chronicles an affair between relations in uncomfortably intimate terms ("I'd wake up at night to watch you pissing").
Though the band insists that many of these songs are based on real-life experience, Salveter's narratives often obscure the line between reality and myth. As reflected by the album's uniformly languorous gait, the only certainty here is misery, and at times, being dragged through this chasmal bleakness can seem endless: "Torture" crawls along for an agonizing seven minutes, but merely states the obvious: "I'm feeling blue/ There's no seeing you." But despite such lows, the rousing "Cause of It" reaches an extraordinary peak, as Salveter reveals his deepest truth: "I want it, I want it to feel/ Like Sam Cooke or Patti Labelle." And in a way, he succeeds. Through his public suffering of separation anxiety, guilt, shame, and a broad-ranging spectrum of other unpleasant emotions, All the Love I Could Find itself becomes Salveter's very real salvation: He feels how he does so we don't have to.
