Being an acoustic musician myself, and a sufferer of mild tinnitus to boot, I often find the volume levels at rock gigs unbearable. My ears don’t recover very quickly from exposure to a lot of noise.
Low are generally very quiet, and they therefore win me over immediately for the fact that I don’t need my trademark gig-going luminous yellow foam earplugs to listen to them. This in turn means I can hear all the subtleties in their playing, of which there are plenty.
Low are a trio comprising husband-and-wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, plus recently-recruited bass player Matt Livingstone, who replaced original bassist Zak Sally. I first heard them back in about 1999/2000 on a compilation sent to me by a friend in Holland; most of its contents were underground novelty records like “Santa Doesn’t Cop Out on Dope” and other such joys, but in the middle of the running order was a song called “Just Like Christmas”. Its warm, lo-fi sound plus exceptional female vocals caught my attention immediately. I knew nothing about them, but bought the “Christmas” EP, closely followed by the “Secret Name” LP, and that was that. I loved their slow, droney sound, and Sparhawk’s singing turned out to be every bit as great as Parker’s.
I always meant to investigate further, but for whatever reason, I never did.
Fast forward to 2006, and their sound seems to have changed little. On stage, they’re not a demonstrative group, although their stage presence is entirely comfortable. Chat is kept to a minimum until late in the set when Sparhawk has to change a string, at which point the group seem refreshingly self-effacing. None of your usual rock egos here.
For a group that play almost everything slowly and quietly, their performance has a tremendous emotional - and dynamic - range. The fact that they spend a lot of time at an absolute whisper means that when they do play at full throttle, with some really raucous distortion on Sparhawk’s open-tuned Telecaster, it has far more impact than groups that chug along with their amplifiers turned up to eleven.
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