How Low Can You Go?

A review of the latest Low album, Double Negative

I must state at the outset that I am a huge lover of most things Low - and I’ve been that way

for almost two, uplifting, decades now, which is fairly ironic, considering. They make some of the most beautiful music ever to emerge from the mists of this small, lonely, isolated planet - particularly if you’re a small, lonely, isolated person - and most of the time when I listen to Low, that’s exactly what I am. It’s not all a death of roses though; sometimes their output is punctuated by spikey, angsty, relevance – just to keep things a bit bums on edge, but in the main, Low are suicide’s most beautiful siren - although you can’t kill yourself – you just have to keep coming back for more. Well, that is, until now.

To my ears, ears that love Magma as much as they love Miles Davis, Mahler as much as Micky Dolenz, ‘Double Negative’ comes across as one of the most pretentious, anti-music albums ever barfed to disc. It seeks to goad, chide and chastise by to pissing all over beauty and decorating the walls of your ears with dirty protest smearings. It lures in fools, devours them in one sore throated gulp and spits them out on a projection of sour vomit. Indeed, you can read the strange praise of fools and self-flagellators galore as they venerate this aural desecration in almost everywhere. Album of the year they say. Album of the year, my arse - says my - er, arse – and most of the rest of me too.

Now, you may not be surprised to learn that there is a producer involved in the creation of this unlistenable garbage. That should come as no surprise to anyone – as surely only someone who has absolutely no idea about music – even art for that matter, can ‘produce’ an album of music that turns out to be an album with hardly any music on it at all. The goon responsible (BJ Burton), and the Sparker two too, must dislocate the shoulder of blame for this aural Armageddon.

So, before I offer up my subjective summary of this, their umpteen thousandth album in a 24-year career, it’s only fair that I give you a track by track breakdown of exactly what it was that caused my own personal tracks to breakdown.

1. Quorum – an unlistenable explosion of audio diarrhoea that seems to have been excreted by this BJ Burton thing, a thing that has obviously listened to Thom Yorke, Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, and who then went on to ruin the raw beauty of Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver project by applying his (or her) “Oooh, look what I had for Christmas’ frippery, via a murder of overbearing knob twiddling and off-piste gadget goonery.

2. Dancing and Blood – or perhaps Beauty meets Beast, Radiohead meets Godzilla, that type of thing. As horrible as it is great. The best track on the album by not very far.

3. Fly – this one had started out reasonably before descending into boring, repetitive Mimi, until it finally melts into a horrible cacophony of electronic dirge. Overall, eating a large fly would be more rewarding.

4. Tempest – begins with yet more electronic compost before almost decomposing totally.

5. Always Up – is mostly always down.

6. Always Trying to Work It Out – begins like it could have been a great high among the Lows but, again, it’s bludgeoned by tedious knob twiddling and relentless ear washing with steel wool.

7. The Son, The Sun – Can it get any worse than this? Contender for the worst track committed to a recording device in the history of music.

8. Dancing and Fire – Well, it started out nice . . . . . – nothing special – but nice. Jeff Buckley Sine e style guitar, with a Sigur Ros noise prevailing behind the vocal (that Icelandic whistling kettle sound, so perfected by Jonsi). Easily the second best so far, but no better than a 5 out of 10.

9. Poor Sucker – ah, here’s the antidote. Hannibal Lecter in the control room stabs, gouges, slashes, scrapes and kills off what would have otherwise been an anthemic high of Low bliss. Hear it once. It will never need to be listened to again. Poor Sucker indeed.

10. Rome (Always in the Dark) – I wondered how long it would be before the totally passé, voice synthy treatment twaddle would be pedalled out. Another low-point that does its incompetent best to kill you by stabbing your heart with a spike crafted from a roll of wet cotton wool.

11. Disarray – An ok song, murdered by the goon on the knobs.

You know, when Picasso painted ‘Guernica’ - his statement on the horrors of war and the life and death that lies within it, he still managed to create an incredible art work that would captivate our half-blind-eyes for all eternity. His antithesis of regular, artistic, beauty was in itself a revolutionary creation of a brand-new beauty. The power of pain, and destruction, and absolute hopelessness, was captured in a manner so wonderful that it gave all remaining humans hope - if they only wanted to look for it – and it was so easy to find, Picasso put it in his picture.

Picasso crafted this magnificence by baring his soul within the confines of his unlimited genius. What he didn’t do was obtain an eleven foot by twenty-five-foot canvas, paint a pair of hand-sized motifs in a couple of places, and then drape a large black blanket over it - through which only the motifs could be seen, via two appropriately placed slits. Had he done so – he would have produced a statement with virtually no artistic value – save for some immature, Dadaist rebelliousness. He could have signed it in another name and it would have sold for nothing.

Low’s latest, on the other hand, is an eleven inch by twenty-five ant canvas, draped in a tired black blanket through which only a couple of fairly meaningless motifs shine through. It is a ‘Low’ product - signed in another name, and that name is BJ Burton. BJ seems to think that it’s a great idea to take the smallest of nice ideas, commit them to binary code – and then obliterate them with the sounds of electronic bowel movements and radioactive steel-wool. His mindless mastery of infantile knob twiddling would have earned him a Saturday morning detention at my school. Left right left right up down up left right down left up down down right. Wow! Awesome as someone in Wisconsin has no doubt already said. Unfortunately, someone forgot to point out that when a cow craps on a diamond, all you can see is shit. This is unlistenable - unless you revere the Emperor in his (or her) new clothes. I played it through once. Never again.

If you love Low anywhere near as much as I do, my advice is to ignore this album completely. It encompasses everything that’s gone wrong in the world, but fails to take the broken bricks of modern existence and build a musical work worthy of consideration as music. This isn't Low; it's Low plus Bad Job Burton. This is a lost sheep of an album that fails to understand that garbage like this has all been binned before. My Bloody Valentine goes to a funeral. John Lennon’s Life with The Lions goes mad in Dorset. Picasso didn't need a producer, his own ideas were good enough.

Before I go, I must quote Captain Mystery, gushing anonymously from Amazon UK’s niftily named 'Product Description' section on the album's sales page:

“Loud and contentious and commanding, Low fights for the world by fighting against it. It begins in pure bedlam, with a beat built from a loop of ruptured noise waging war against the paired voices of Sparhawk and Parker the moment they begin to sing during the massive "Quorum." For forty minutes, they indulge the battle, trying to be heard amid the noisy grain, sometimes winning and sometimes being tossed toward oblivion. In spite of the mounting noise, Sparhawk and Parker still sing. Or maybe they sing because of the noise. For Low, has there ever really been a difference?”

"Or maybe they sing because of the noise."?? This is surely the ultimate in claptrappery. "Or maybe they should have gone down the pub, instead." would probably have been better.

For me, ‘Double Negative’ falls someway short of the second negative that may have turned this horrific listening experience into a positive. Consequently, this reviewer can only award it shit out of five. Listen to Low's 'Long Division' instead – surely a seven out of five experience for depressed mathematicians, everywhere. I live in hope that the album's called 'Double Negative' because Sparhawk and Parker hate it too. Now that would throw a screeching cat among the half-baked pigeons.

Spotify References:

Low: Double Negative:

https://open.spotify.com/album/1zTkgOHx3mjrUvrhxq4osf?si=r2hsOXz6REe6lcw9PdWb5g

Low: Long Division

https://open.spotify.com/album/5nuBlL5YUcZtVR0JnmsYVv?si=YHNES5g5T8658FS7HnyYug

John Lennon & Yoko Ono : Unfinished Music, No. 2: Life with the Lions 

https://open.spotify.com/album/0NDlrEsyJTxrYtxZRC5at1?si=kEorptgsQT2Pa5jICG_49w

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

https://open.spotify.com/album/20YQiWvyD8Yi7Xge7ukVrm?si=PeWSEtxJSnuax5ovP-RY4g

KJF 29/10/2018