When Low first came on the scene they were difficult to classify—bits and pieces of their music were easy to connect to other bands, but no one sounded like them. As the ’90s wore on, tourmates and label associations pulled them in the direction of ambient-inclined post-rock, and bands like Labradford, Mogwai, and Dirty Three became peers. These elements of Low’s sound were first heard in Sparhawk’s guitar playing, which used swells in volume, minimalist repetition, and dissonance for expressive effects rather than melodic or harmonic development. The chord progression on “Cut” is unusual in that it seems clearly connected to his alt-rock days—imagine it scuffed up and used to build a grunge tune. On the nearly 10-minute “Lullaby,” we get a sense of the furious strumming and wide dynamics that would become more common with Low later.
Given the limitations of her spare setup, Parker’s drum and cymbal play an outsized part in defining Low’s aesthetic. There are countless records where the unhurried tempo is what you notice first—Chet Baker’s 1954 recording of “I Get Along With You Very Well (Except Sometimes)” comes to mind for me—but no one made you feel the slowness like Low did, and Parker’s percussion was a large part of that. At times, you can sense your body wanting beats to come faster, and the music’s confident insistence of its pulse keeps knocking you back. The pace becomes a force in and of itself.
This would be Nichols’ only album with Low—disagreements over the band’s rigorous tour schedule led to his departure and the addition of long-time bassist Zak Sally. Though his time with the band was short, Nichols’ role on Hope is significant. Low’s sound is grounded in music where the basslines matter, and the music is so skeletal the instrument has to carry its weight. Nichols’ melodic approach draws heavily from Joy Division’s Peter Hook and the Cure’s Simon Gallup, but the record’s cavernous production lends a ghostly dubbiness that hints at danger. Almost every track has a bassline that sticks in your mind from the first play.
Hear it on the quietly harrowing “Rope,” where Nichols moves back and forth between ominous low end and tapped harmonics while Parker plays along with an almost metal-like intensity. The song’s title is its most important word but, model of efficiency, the song itself never uses it. “You’re gonna need more,” Sparhawk sings, and we only know what he means at the very end, when he speaks the line, “Don’t ask me to kick any chairs out from under you.” The fragment on suicide is counterbalanced by the closing recitation of the country standard “You Are My Sunshine” (retitled “Sunshine”), which has been sung by many a weary parent over their baby’s crib.
Low made a video for “Words.” For most of the clip, we see each player with their instrument in a dark room, so young, separate but together, and the video is bookended by grainy 16mm footage of the trio dragging a boat along the shore of Lake Superior in the dead of winter. The camera kept freezing, and they had to return to the car repeatedly to warm it up. I Could Live in Hope came out in February, and for such a small release from an unusual band, it got around. Nearly every review mentioned how slow and depressing the whole thing was, and almost all of them praised it despite these qualities. The band quickly got used to talking about the “Why?” of their music in every interview.
“The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory,” Milan Kundera wrote in his 1995 novel, Slowness. “The degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” The author writes of slowing down when walking if you are trying to remember something, and speeding up when departing an unpleasant encounter, as if to leave it behind forever.
As time went on, Sparhawk and Parker let more into Low and the band’s sound expanded and widened until, on their two final records, 2018’s Double Negative and 2021’s HEY WHAT, it shattered in glorious fashion. Parker’s death from cancer in 2022 can make that later work hard to hear. It helps to first return to the beginning, when Low’s music was something precious and theirs alone, an infant idea that needed protection.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.
