Low is trapped. Because the trio is still defined by its slow, spare, stately style of a decade ago, each of its last five discs has been called a departure.
In truth, Low’s sound never underwent a radical shift. As guitarist Alan Sparhawk, drummer Mimi Parker and bassist Zak Sally grew more confident, their approach got more adventurous and the results more varied.
Consequently it’s tough to convince folks when the band really has reinvented itself, as it has with Drums And Guns. For one thing, Sally’s gone, replaced by Matt Livingston. The difference in sound, though, comes not from new personnel but a complete rethinking of what’s at the core of a Low song.
Here, that core is the programmed percussion, looped samples and other processed sounds underneath Sparhawk and Parker’s incantatory harmonies. The mechanized beats twitch, skitter and boom by turns, echoing like rifle reports on distant hills.
What’s more, in a clear pivot away from the anthemic pop sunbursts of 2005’s The Great Destroyer, this Low employs guitars almost solely for color. Sparhawk’s electric merely sighs and scuffs at the edges of his vocals in “Dragonfly” and lends wheezy feedback to the droning “Pretty People”, to name just two of several songs in which soldiers die, bodies break and drugs run out.
Not to say that Drums And Guns is all, or even mostly, harsh or challenging. Fear not, technophobes: The beat to “Breakers” is Neptunes-like in its austerity, but Low adds the human touch from ragged handclaps, too. The hooky “Hatchet” comes off like a love note passed between record buffs: “You be my Charlie and I can be your George,” Sparhawk sings, “let’s bury the hatchet like the Beatles and the Stones.” And melodies don’t come much more beautiful than the album-closing “Violent Past”.
So go ahead and doubt that Low has finally made a different sort of record, but believe at least this much: Eight albums in, Low is searching, striving, relevant, and still hungry after all these years.