Music Review: Low - Drums and Guns
Slow, stark, yet magnetic. Minnesota group Low have abandoned the methods they used to make 2005's pop attempt The Great Destroyer. Instead, they opted for their tried and true crawling pace for the upcoming Drums and Guns, except in lieu of the sparse guitars that thinly coated their previous works, Low (along with co-producer Dave Fridmann) chose to represent their trademark minimalism with synths and drum machines.
Many times you can count the instrument layers on Drums and Guns with one hand. The lyrics follow suit too, where a half-paragraph or sentence can comprise an entire song idea. For any normal band, this behavior could be dangerously pretentious, but for Low it’s beautiful- they're sucking the life out of their arrangements and breathing it back into the audience.
More a series of dirges than anything else, Drums and Guns plays with humanity's natural fixation on death and brings about as much confusion as it does understanding. Singer Alan Sparhawk pours on the drama from the first line of “Pretty People” warning that all the soldiers "are all gonna die." Background vocalist Mimi Parker makes these songs as gloriously haunting as they are- especially on “Sandinista,” about the Marxist Revolutionaries in Nicaragua.
The one ear sore in the landscape of the record is “Hatchet.” Everything up until then is heavily weighted and serious- a peppy cut about “The Beatles and The Stones” burying the hatchet doesn’t bring emotional balance to Drums as much as it detracts from the solemn power.
The majority of the songs still pulse and hum with a controlled fervor. “Breaker,” an absolute gem, finds Sparhawk and Parker philosophizing that maybe in killing others, we’re really killing ourselves:
“Our bodies break and the blood just spills and spills/but here we sit debating math/it's just a shame/my hand just kills and kills/there's gotta be an end to that.”
A fuzzy organ closes out the album on “Violent Past” like a dark hymn, and the final indention left by Drums and Guns on your mind is that few bands are as comfortable and confident as Low at nullifying liveliness in their music and using it to their advantage. You’ll scarcely find a more thought-provoking effort this year.
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