Author: Chris Godsey

For ten years, Low’s music has seethed with quiet rural rage—the undercurrent of emotional tension that hums in austere Midwestern places, among people whose deeper feelings are seldom expressed. From the band’s home base on Duluth’s Central Hillside, it has built an international cult following for creating rock music that’s intelligent, intense, ambient, and awesomely slow. Low concerts are contemplative and quiet—a single guitar or vocal tone might resonate alone for minutes—and dedicated fans demand absolute silence. Try to talk while you should be listening, and you’ll get glared at, even shushed. Typical Low album and show reviews rely on northern Minnesota’s winter landscape—all gray skies and gloom—as the band’s putative muse, with writers summoning metaphors involving frozen lakes, frigidity, and long, dark nights.

Every song title on the band’s first record, 1994’s I Could Live in Hope, is a single syllable grim with portent. The album sleeve reads like an impressionistic poem about what happens to repressed emotion in a northern town—loaded words like “Fear,” “Cut,” “Drag,” “Rope”—while the songs themselves are long, emotionally brutal, and sparse. And the lyrics! “You’re gonna need more,” Alan Sparhawk sings on “Rope.” “Don’t ask me to kick any chairs out from under you.”

Themes like illness and medication, water, breath, family, and regret have run in cycles throughout Low’s albums; anger, more measured than understated, has been constant. “Fear of God and a disappointing father / holds the hand around your neck,” Sparhawk and Mimi Parker sing on the strummy, sunny-sounding “La la la Song,” from 2003’s Trust. On the menacing “John Prine,” from the same record, Sparhawk coos darkly, “I thought I was a poet / I had so much to say / but now I want to see the blood / I want to make them pay,” while Zak Sally wields his bass like a bludgeon. Until Trust, the anger was mostly oblique, couched in cryptic lyrics and ominous arrangements. Sometimes it was barely hidden behind an ironic, almost sentimental facade, as in Grant Wood’s American Gothic or Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.”

Kids are naturally curious, no matter where they grow up, and hungry minds in small towns often starve. Small-town kids may not know exactly what they’re missing, but they know they’re missing it. Once radio, television, magazines, and the Web have tantalized them with the surreal worlds of Paris, New York, Minneapolis—even, for some, Duluth—they have no choice but to confront just how deeply their hometowns suck.

Some of those kids just wither away. They bury curiosity and become adults who are terrified of the unfamiliar. Some rebel with the angry-kids’ trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Others move to big cities, where they strive to be open-minded and sophisticated, but never feel entirely free of ore dust, hog manure, or backwoods ways.

The strangest kids of all might become deeply revered musicians. They mete out a decade’s worth of ascetic music that boils with emotion but inevitably gets interpreted with metaphors about glacial movement, frozen lakes, and long, dark nights. And maybe, after those ten years are up, they’ll change their sound and let that emotion erupt.

On The Great Destroyer, Low drops the stoicism. Anger that used to fester is now immediate and direct. A lacerating keyboard tone rips open the first track, “Monkey,” and is quickly joined by an insistent drum beat. Within ten seconds, purist fans may be shocked to realize that Low is obviously pissed off, and has no problem doing something loud and fast about it. “Tonight you will be mine,” Sparhawk and Parker chant in a drum-driven fever dream. “Tonight the monkey dies.” Sparhawk delivers that last line alone, and the dreamy tone takes on a vicious edge. Before the next verse, there’s more guitar, drums, and volume than in three or four previous Low albums combined.

And that’s just the start of the record. Some moments vibrate with impatience, as if the band’s urge to unabashedly rock could barely be contained on tape. Have Alan Sparhawk and his alter-ego, Chicken Bone George, the leader of a primal electric blues outfit called the Black-eyed Snakes (they sound like MC5 and Howlin’ Wolf crashing into each other), been working on songs together? No Low record before this one has had such guttural moments.

“Monkey” smoothly segues into “California,” a melancholy pop song with painfully catchy hooks and harmonies that could make it a legitimate hit. The song is so damn beautiful and rhythmic that it unleashes uncomfortable levels of pleasure—it’ll reach into your crotch or right down your throat and yank out the kind of emotional responses that Midwestern inhibitions are designed to hide. Seriously.

Almost every song on The Great Destroyer builds on, but also departs from, Low’s musical past. The band’s move to the legendary independent label Sub Pop is significant, too. Compared with Low’s former label, Kranky (a small, serious operation), Sub Pop’s prominence is enormous. Many bands that have recorded for Sub Pop—Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, the Shins, Ween, the White Stripes, Bright Eyes—found ways, with the label’s help, to transcend obscurity and maintain credibility. They earned popularity, and its opportunities for security and longevity, without losing integrity. If Low is truly comfortable with letting its songs be loud, fast, and catchy—in other words, more accessible to a broad audience—then maybe Sparhawk, Parker, and Sally are finally comfortable with being truly popular. Maybe they even want popularity.

“For a long time we thought slow and quiet was the way to go, but we were wrong,” Sparhawk said while tuning his guitar between songs during an October show at the Twin Ports Music and Arts Collective, a storefront space in downtown Duluth. Low played around eleven o’clock, after two other bands. Only about thirty people were watching, and that’s pitiful, even if the show was poorly promoted and went past ten on a school night. It seems that when unique, humble, globally prominent artists play an almost-free local show, more than a handful of people could trouble themselves to show up.

Sparhawk always plays on the audience’s left. While introducing a song from The Great Destroyer, he said, with flustered, shocking sincerity, “I wrote this when I was really, really mad at Zak. But I’m not mad at him anymore. I just … I don’t know if he knows this, I’ve never told him this before, and I just wanted to … .” Sally, at stage right, stepped to his own mic, looked over to Sparhawk, and said, “I don’t hate you anymore, either.” He was grinning, but only sort of. Parker stood serenely at her drum kit, looking down and to the side. Then the band tore into the disarmingly bitter “Everybody’s Song.”

Amid Parker’s simple, violent snare drum strikes and a discordant barrage of fuzzed-up guitar—the sonic equivalent of Sparhawk grabbing Sally by the front of his shirt and forcing their gazes to meet—Sparhawk’s voice quavers with venom: “Pour yourself another cup, another cup, another cup / and wait / I can’t wait forever / Live your life of stupid luck, of stupid luck, of stupid luck / it’s a game / nobody does it better.” As Sparhawk approaches “forever” and “better,” the keyboard crescendoes and clips, then he and Parker attack the chorus: “Breakin’ everybody’s heart / takin’ everyone apart / breakin’ everybody’s heart / singin’ everybody’s song.” The word “song” gets held for a long time before it crashes back into the melee of fuzz and guts.

Sally briefly quit Low in the spring of 2003. “It was never necessarily an artistic difference, and we weren’t necessarily fighting,” Sparhawk told a Minneapolis music critic at the time. “He just didn’t want to do this fo
rever.” Not long after, it was announced that Low would open a few summer dates in Spain for Radiohead. Sally was back.

Hearing and seeing “Everybody’s Song” live, in a space not much larger than a living room, where people were actually sitting on couches, was awkwardly intimate. It was like being at a friend’s house when a family fight erupts and no graceful exit strategy is available. That kind of transparency doesn’t exist on previous Low discs, but it pervades The Great Destroyer.

“When I Go Deaf” and “Death of a Salesman” speak frankly about a time when it will be OK not to write or sing songs—when an artist’s obligation to create has died or been beaten away. “Deaf” begins wistfully and quietly (Sally’s timing is perfect when Sparhawk and Parker sing the phrase “make love”) before exploding into a cathartic guitar howl. “And I’ll stop writing songs / stop scratching out lines / I won’t have to think / and it won’t have to rhyme,” Sparhawk sings, and it sounds like the words begin deep in his throat, as if he’s about to shout, but thinks better of it as the words are leaving his mouth. “Death” is sad and ostensibly simple. It culminates with the lines, “I forgot all my songs / the words now were wrong / and I burned my guitar in a rage / but the fire came to rest / in your white velvet breast / so somehow I just know that it’s safe.”

It’s the type of song you’ll think you could write. You can’t, but that’s OK, because not many people can. And besides, you don’t really want to—you’d wind up horrified by how exposed such honesty would make you feel. Best that we leave such unfettered expression to our artists.

Crew Jones is a trio of white guys who met while living in a Grand Marais hippy commune. Named after a character in the 1986 BMX movie Rad, the Joneses call themselves “Minnesota’s Northernmost Rap Band” and the “inventors of Forest-Rap.” They also claim to be “holding it down as kingpins of the cutthroat Twin Ports rap scene.” Despite the foolery, the group is no joke; Crew Jones’ beats are tight, its rhymes impressionistic, and its sound unique—the result of soaking up equal parts Bob Dylan, Atmosphere, and National Public Radio.

Not long ago, in a dim Duluth basement, the group performed for about twenty-five white kids, one dark-skinned black guy, and a mixed dude whose shoulder-length dreads matched the powdered cocoa color of his skin. Rolled-up carpet scraps, defunct stereo gear, and cardboard boxes with crushed corners were piled along two walls. At the foot of a steep wooden stairway, hipsters crowded onto sagging couches were steadily adding butts to an overflowing ashtray. Sweat and mostly legal smoke made the air murky and moist. A keg of flat Lake Superior Special Ale was nearly fried.

Crew Jones is smart enough to understand that the only scene in Duluth-Superior that could remotely be considered “cutthroat” is composed mostly of latter-day hippy chicks, coeds from suburbs like Eden Prairie and Minnetonka who try to out-patchouli each other during bluegrass night at Pizza Lucé on Superior Street. The crew takes music seriously; themselves—not so much.
In the basement, Mic Trout (né Sean Elmquist) was crammed into a corner, behind his Fender Rhodes electric piano. At the start of each song, he punched up staccato drum-machine beats, then he and two other guys—one with a six-string, the other on a bass—added understated funk. Out front, Burly Burlesque (Ben Larson) and Ray Wolf (Rain Elfvin) gripped microphones and alternated verses.

“Oh, livin’ in the city is fine / if you’re outta your mind /gettin’ giddy over overpopulation and crime,” Burlesque rapped on “Banjones,” which actually does feature a banjo, on the group’s album Who’s Beach. (They know how to use apostrophes; near Grand Marais there’s a beach that bears the name of someone—possibly a first baseman—named Who.) Later in the song, Wolf said, “till the day that I die I’m reppin’ Northeastern Minnesota / from the Range to the Shore / you can claim that you’re bored / the trains hold the iron ore.” He’s the lyrical literalist of the group, with a resonant voice and a delivery that almost sounds like he’s putting on East Coast hip-hop airs.

Burly Burlesque is the most compelling of the Joneses. He affects a vocal style that conjures Shane McGowan honoring the memory of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, but it comes off smoothly, naturally. His lyrics include abstract references to fantasy art, Antietam, a few forms of recreational drugs, Sisyphus, and masturbation (unless I misunderstand his story about bathing in the Brule River with a bar of Dr. Bronner’s soap). Burly’s manic stage presence is the antithesis of Larson’s shy intellectualism.

Mic Trout, the group’s poet, didn’t rap during the basement show, but on Who’s Beach, he weaves a cautionary tale about substance abuse to his younger brother, and raps about ice fishing and cliff diving into North Shore rivers. On “Memory of Me” he says, “We’ll say we caught our limit / they’ll never know the difference / we’ll make this a tradition for whenever winter visits / think of the shiny fishes / under the water frigid / like ghosts from our memory / our history revisited.”

As Trout bounced and bobbed in his chair, a handful of twentysomething girls attempted dance moves that most Duluthians have seen only on TV. A few guys pogoed arhythmically, like they would have to any other kind of music. Everyone else just nodded their heads to the big Superior beat.—Chris Godsey