Drums and Guns - Low

8.3	Listal rating

Manufacturer : Sub Pop
Release date : 20 March 2007
EAN : 0098787073621
UPC : 098787073621

None item

Description

Album DescriptionFormed in 1993, Low is from Duluth, Minnesota, and features Alan Sparhawk on vocals and guitar, Mimi Parker on vocals and drums, and Matt Livingston on bass and vocals. Sparhawk and Parker are married with two children; they first met in fourth grade in rural Minnesota. Drums and Guns is the band's eighth full-length Album Description
Formed in 1993, Low is from Duluth, Minnesota, and features Alan Sparhawk on vocals and guitar, Mimi Parker on vocals and drums, and Matt Livingston on bass and vocals. Sparhawk and Parker are married with two children; they first met in fourth grade in rural Minnesota. Drums and Guns is the band's eighth full-length album and second for Sub Pop. It's also, after 2005's The Great Destroyer, the second album they've recorded with producer Dave Fridmann. Drums and Guns features a number of songs that ardent Low fans will recognize from the band's recent live shows. These songs appear here in substantially altered forms, as though they've been taken apart and reassembled in striking new ways, or seen with new eyes. Or, given the lyrical emphasis on murder and death, a more insightful interpretation might see the band killing these songs and bringing them back to life anew. There's no contrivance here, however. While these songs feature new elements (looped vocals, drum machines, etc.) and are thoroughly, radiantly contemporary, they remain undeniably Low's. Drums and Guns possesses the unique, subtle beauty and power we've come to expect from Low, but the record is also profoundly exciting in ways that it's easy to forget music can be.

For The Great Destroyer, their 2005 Sub Pop debut (and 7th album overall), Low quickened their paces and rustled up a new sound. Producer Dave Fridmann helped out in '05 and is back for Drums and Guns, Low's 2007 follow up, a return to pre- Great Destroyer form. Slowing down again and training the musical lamps on Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk's austere voices, the trio sets a decidedly somber tone (the album's opening line, delivered with pregnant pauses: "All soldiers, they're all gonna die/And all the little babies, they're all gonna die" and album-closing song titles: "Murderer" and "Violent Past"). Parker and Sparhawk's voices enchant eerily, a whiff of electonica here and a haunted handclap there melding with Matt Livingston's bass to give the music some dark, gorgeous machine undertones--stark, martial, and noise-brushed at once. Fridmann finds all kinds of places to add tone, color and sound, keeping the tempos slow and the mood hypnotic. This is the art that wartime breeds. --Andrew Bartlett

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