Low - Hey What
The last record from this Minnesota band delivered something of a shock. Produced by BJ Burton, who worked on Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, Low’s 2018 release Double Negative saw melodies and rhythms broken apart and piled on top of one another in textured layers.
For Low's 13th album, married couple Alan Sparhawk (guitar) and Mimi Parker (drums), together with Burton, have taken this process to an exhilarating, static-spattered extreme: guitar parts are chopped and screwed, played backwards or malevolently swarm in their seeming dozens; beats fall as ominous, mechanical clangings and chatter in metronomic panic, low-end noises blow out in frazzled fractals, and spaces between sounds erratically expand and contract. It’s not chaos, but a strikingly dynamic, carefully engineered construction. Rather than being ugly or cacophonous, these decompositions are starkly beautiful and soaked in emotion.
Opener ‘White Horses’ delivers an abrasive, electronic wallop that Sparhawk’s and Parker’s (undistorted) voices cut through like a shaft of light through a storm cloud, while on ‘Hey’, the warm, amniotic throb of synths beneath multi-tracked vocals gradually gives way to a single-note drone and Parker’s hushed, one-word incantation. Though its songwriting DNA is (largely) intact, Hey What recalls the glitchy noisescapes of Clark and 100 Gecs. It’s not only a bold, brilliant move for Low, but a welcome jolt to alt-rock orthodoxy, too.
Out now. Label: Sup Pop