On Low

This week at Do You Compute is dedicated to Low. Each day will be focused on one of their first six releases—I Could Live in Hope, Long Division, Transmission, The Curtain Hits the Cast, Songs for a Dead Pilot, and Secret Name. I'm re-posting yesterday's posts here, combined into one. Head over there today for more on I Could Live in Hope and Long Division, and more posts on the group through Friday.

It’s 1994 and I’m still stumbling through the bins at Tower Records in Fresno, California, still fumbling my way away from metal and toward indie and punk. By now I’ve found heavy bands like Craw or Dazzling Killmen that aren’t stereotypical metal, and I’ve found labels like Dischord (Fugazi, Hoover, Nation of Ulysses) and Touch and Go (Slint, Shellac). But still I don’t have a real road map of where to go next, what key bands I’m missing. So I scour the bins at Tower looking for album covers that jump out at me. That’s how I found Low.

What was it about the cover for I Could Live in Hope? Its brown tone, the simple type treatment, the photograph of the child at his desk blurring into the single-color background, It wasn’t the cartoonishly violent imagery of metal nor the crisply designed sleeves of Dischord albums. I had no idea what this band Low sounded like, but the cover was quiet. The band’s name was an adjective, an emotion, a tone, all summed up in three letters. The album title was a strange mixture of optimism and despair—I could live in hope. It was also an evocative image—to exist inside of, be enveloped by, a single feeling. I turned the CD over and read the track list—eleven one-word titles that was like a grocery list of permanent immersion into some kind of oblivion:

Words
Fear
Cut
Slide
Lazy
Lullaby
Sea
Down
Drag
Rope
Sunshine

Yet, simply by looking at the front and back cover, it didn’t seem like a record filled with darkness. The cover’s first impression isn’t that it will be a bleak experience. Imagine if the overriding color was black, not brown, and everything else—the band name, the album title, the track list—remained. The whole record would feel like a suicide note. “Cut,” “Fear,” “Rope”—it’s all a signifier for deep depression. But instead, thanks to that light brown color, the record seems more closely tethered to the few bright words—“Hope,” “Lullaby,” “Sunshine.”

I had to buy the record. It begged to be heard, to be understood. When I put it on that evening, I was surprised to find that it was beautiful.

• Low: Lazy

I Could Live in Hope could not have felt more different from everything I’d ever heard up to that point. It was never loud, never fast, never distorted, barely dynamic in that loud/quiet Slint sense (save perhaps “Lullaby,” which builds over ten minutes from a halting six-note arpeggio to an almost boisterous guitar solo). The vocals, unlike so many other indie bands of the era, were clean and up front in the mix, unadorned except for a shimmering layer of reverb. Yet it was more than a simple “quiet” record. Its tone and structure were different from the folk records I’d grown up on or the somber moments on albums like Ten or Automatic for the People. Though I know now that Low had a few precedents—Galaxie 500 and Red House Painters must factor into the conversation, surely—I Could Live in Hope  felt entirely unique to me; I was compelled to listen to it religiously for the better part of my senior year in high school.

This record was my sea change. This was the album that attuned my ears to smaller details in songs, to a depth of emotion and thought that was largely lost in the loud and aggressive music of my past. I already owned records by the likes of Slint and Codeine, both of which were also seminal records for me, but I Could Live in Hope keyed into something different.

*

Low: Words

Everything seems louder at night, when all the ambient noise in your life seems to go away—traffic dies down, birds stop singing, dogs stop barking, sprinklers stop running, TVs and radios are off, every door in your house is closed. When you play your stereo in the day you put the volume at six or seven so it feels comfortable to your ears. At night, six or seven is positively cacophonous. Two or three feels more than appropriate.

I’d owned I Could Live in Hope for a couple of months by now. I played it every night as I lay down to go to sleep: a quiet record, played quietly, at the quietest time of the day. It was one of these nights where I noticed for the first time, laying there in the darkness, that I couldn’t hear the kick drum. I listened intently for it over the course of three or four songs in a row—I just couldn’t hear it.

I got up. I turned on a light—light allows you to be louder—and I turned the stereo up. Still there was no kick drum, nor any toms, nor high hat. Eleven songs, each propelled by snare and ride cymbal, nothing more.

• Low: Sea

Much more on Low all week at DYC, so stop in if you're interested.

Comments

[dave]

yo scott! ive been jamming the curtain hits the cast quite a bit over the last few months after sort of rediscovering it!

such a great record! i need to pull this one out of the archives now after reading your post!

dave

[Richard]

Nice.

[grange85]

Very nice write-up. I came across this album by accident, on the back of a cassette that someone had lent me to listen to the other side of. It had a pretty profound affect on me. Can't remember what I was supposed to listen to!

[James]

Words is one of the best songs ever, and Sea is just as beautiful for its short length. Great song choices.

[sroden]

i remember discovering the band similarly through this record right about the time it was released, buying it on a whim because of the cover. i'd been pretty much out of listening to any new rock/song music for a few years and this record was like a gift to my ears and sensibilities to go back into the world of songs as a listener, so much possibility in their subtlety... i too was totally blown away by it. since secret name was the pinnacle for me, and their next record after that was the end for me, i'm really curious to read your journey through their best... and whoa man, that last paragraph about listening to music at night is absolutely beautiful...!

[scott pgwp]

Thanks everyone for the comments. Dave - my post on Curtain Hits the Cast will go up a little later today. Steve - I got off the Low train at exactly the same time. Things We Lost was the last record I bought by them... I'll have something to say about falling out of love with Low as well, on Friday.

Glad everyone is enjoying the posts!

[Richard]

We've sort of talked about this before, but I want to again throw a good word in for the beautiful Things We Lost in the Fire (with the additional caveat that I'm aware that it might, and apparently does, look different coming from different personal Low-histories).

However, in retrospect, that was indeed the correct last record to buy. Subsequent records have been only of intermittent interest to me.

[scott pgwp]

I don't really have negative feelings toward that album... it's just the last album I felt I "needed" - and the only Low album I once owned but don't own any more. I do have a vague desire to still pick up everything I've missed in the last eight years, especially after binging on them this week in a way I haven't done for a long time. We'll see... most the records are on eMusic, after all...

[jeremy]

I've bought a couple of post-lost in the fire albums, but haven't been terribly interested in them. you're not missing too much I don't think.

But I have to say that lost in the fire is arguably my favorite album of theirs. I think curtain is when they started to get really great, and fire is near perfect to my ears. I'll be interested to see what you have to say about it as we approach the end of the week.

[grange85]

I keep buying Low albums although like many "Things We Lost..." was where buying for love gave way to buying out of duty and hope

[dave]

sunflower and dinosaur act are great tunes though!

[scott pgwp]

All this talk about that album made me download it so I can listen to it again. Probably been at least six years since I've listened to it.

[yr wife]

Also not the biggest fan of their newer stuff (of course you know that we are on the same page), but I have to publicly profess my love for the Optimim remix of Hatchet that I downloaded somewhere a while back, and encourage all you other boys commenting here to find it. That is simply a groovy song. A bit unexpected for those guys, but awesome all the same... sorta reminds me of the anomalous goodness of "Peanut Butter Toast and American Bandstand".

[dave]

scott, just got through reading through your posts on low... really a great read! it not only reminded me of when you first recommended long division, and I could live in hope. thanks for sharing then and again this week!

thats so crazy your wedding was 8 years ago!

hope to get together with you guys soon!
dave