Low

On November 2, 2004, George W. Bush, the US president of the War on Terror who launched an unconditional conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq after the September 11, 2001 attacks, is re-elected. "The Great Destroyer" — the "son" of the Republican political establishment, a Texan oilman and born-again Methodist Christian, a recovering alcoholic and murky figure in American history who, across two presidencies full of dark corners, is the architect of the permanent, suffocating dread that looms over the seventh album by Low — casts its gloom from the very first bars of the opening "Monkey".

The trio, made up of married couple Mimi Parker (drums, vocals) and Alan Sparhawk (guitars, vocals) alongside Zac Sally (bass), grew up in Duluth, in frigid Minnesota, the city that gave birth to Bob Dylan, where each member cultivated singing, faith and community. Ever since I Could Live In Hope (Vernon Yard, 1994), Low have played an active part in the slowcore movement, shaping it with a deeply personal signature that seemed to spring straight from the bare walls of a church and the quiet of a place muffled by snow and ice. It's a sound that wound its way through folk paths with flashes of noise and psychedelia, with which the trio, armed with just a handful of instruments, managed to lay bare the depths of the soul, starting from the most terrifying silence and exploring grace, disgust, solitude, bliss and damnation.

The band's previous effort, Trust (Kranky, 2002), bare-boned and twilit, had left us emotionally drained, drowning us in reverb. Just think of the cover art, but also of tracks like "(That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace", whose sinister xylophone lines intertwine with lashing snare hits, and "John Prine", with its calm, feral tolling. Out of that black hole called "trust", Low emerge with an explosion, constantly searching for the redemption — for themselves and for us — that one of the bands closest to their sensibility, the Velvet Underground, never wanted to find. So Mimi, Alan and Zac stubbornly try to claw their way out of the abyss and, in the case of The Great Destroyer, they do it with a scream worthy of Ginsberg.

Once again composing on home turf, the band then holed up in the studio with producer Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips), who that same year was also behind the desk for another devastating-sounding album, The Woods by Sleater-Kinney (Sub Pop, 2005). Everything was kept in-house: the artwork was drawn by Zac, while the photos are by Hollis, Mimi and Alan's daughter. Inside, a few credits and scant liner notes: "What began in our living room in Duluth... ended in Fredonia... at Tarbox Road Studios, Cassadaga, NY".

The abyss opens up right from the compressed distortions and howling organs of "Monkey", driven by the solid groove of Mimi's drums and the bare strumming of Alan's acoustic guitar, which immediately knock the wind out of us. Alan and Mimi's voices lead us by the hand into a tunnel where you can barely breathe, moving from a cruel verse to the psychedelic lashes of the chorus, in an inner landscape that recalls Cormac McCarthy's The Road:

Now who’s to blame? You used to be the same

Now you won’t let me speak your name, what a shame

It’s a suicide, shut up and drive

We’re never gonna make the light

But it’s alright

‘Cause tonight you will be mine

Tonight the monkey dies

"California", a song dedicated to Alan's mother and the album's first single, seems to create a dimension of sweetness, familiarity and quiet through its indie-rock groove, a mood that also returns in "Just Stand Back".

But the calm is only temporary: soon the comforting sounds of "California" and "Everybody's Song" are dragged back into the blazing tensions of the opening track, which, right from its first notes, tears through the gentleness of what came before with searing feedback and industrial machinations. The combined voices of Mimi and Alan, sky and earth, merge with the fire of the instruments in another song of devastating beauty:

Mother why did I become

The angry son

The angry one

Breaking everybody’s heart

Taking everyone apart

Breaking everybody’s heart

Singing everybody’s song

The first thing that stands out is the sound of "The Great Destroyer": Alan's guitar seems to break free from the rigid clean/distorted tone of previous albums to become richer in shading, moving between overdrive and fuzz, able to balance delicacy and rage. Tracks like "Monkey" and "Everybody's Song", with their hyper-compressed distortions and piercing feedback, are something new for the band, fast-forwarding us straight to what would become the final phase of their career, one leaning more towards noise and drone music, as in the negativecore of "Double Negative" (Sub Pop, 2018). Compared to the past, the reverbs are also less pronounced: the "rooms" of resonance shrink, turning the sound more into "flesh" after having been "spirit".

The band proceeds by subtraction, with the gentle folk of "Silver Rider" and the electro-gospel of "Cue The Strings", and by addition, with the psychedelia of "On The Edge Of" or the corroded pop dirge of "Step", featuring Hollis's voice.

In the album's murky atmosphere, we sit in silence listening to the folk-spiritual of "When I Go Deaf", which alternates between the contemplative voices of the couple, backed by parlor guitar, and the instrumental ecstasy of the chorus:

And we will make love

We won’t have to fight

We won’t have to speak

And we won’t have to lie

And I’ll stop writing songs

Stop scratching out lines

I won’t have to fake

And it won’t have to rhyme

"Broadway (So Many People)" acts as a sonic waystation, an indie-rock chant that sounds like a nursery rhyme before turning into a sacred song, setting up the album's finale with one of the darkest, most devastating tracks in Low's entire career. "Pissing" is in fact a slow, repetitive mantra that, like a spiral, drags you into the darkest night, with echoes of coffee cups touched at first, only to end up wide-eyed before the Apocalypse, which thunders on "alone":

I can’t see

Sing the darker of

Pissing on my toes

Knowing what I know

I know

I’m waiting

Like a loyal whore

Under every stone

Lovers sleep alone

Alone

Alone

Lovers sleep alone

Alone

Alone

A thread of hope is restored by Alan's acoustic guitar and voice on “Death Of A Salesman”, evoking the warmth of a community gathered to listen in a small room, hearing a story that's likely familiar and, precisely for that reason, all the more heartfelt. The closing “Walk Into The Sea” offers a perspective that carries through to a dreamlike finale, with its sturdy, melodic indie-rock, its genuine fervor and the sense of presence given by Mimi and Alan's unison voices.

The album came out on January 25, 2005, just days after Bush Jr.'s second inauguration at the White House. It's the first record the band released for Seattle's Sub Pop, the label that would accompany them all the way to their final “HEY WHAT” (2021), and it's the first album in which the band's introspective, concave slowcore takes on a cosmic, convex dimension, aware of having become a purification rite for our ears and a balm for our souls. Its live rendition is devastating, so much so that in 2010 the trio chose “The Great Destroyer” as the album to revisit at the Auditorium of the Primavera Sound in Barcelona, just five years after its release.

“The Great Destroyer” can now be counted among the classics of the North American epic and of contemporary music at large: not merely a songbook or concept album, but a novel or a collection of poems and psalms. Listening to the album again just days after its painful anniversary, we once more mourn the extraordinary artistry of Mimi Parker, whose voice we miss more than ever in this fragile, uncertain present.

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04/11/2024