LOW | LIVE REVIEW
Tramshed, Cardiff, Tue 2 Aug
Low have spent upwards of 20 years demonstrating that ‘extremity’ in music, such as it is, needn’t be the preserve of loud or offensive or wilfully outrageous artists. Their extremity is one of minimalism: their songs, two dozen of which are played this evening, exist in the rock idiom but are stripped of nearly all adornments, reduced until a single chord or drum hit takes on meaning in a quiet room.
For the first 45 minutes of the Minnesotan trio’s set – two sets, in fact, split via an interval – the room is indeed quiet: Low are making their first ever non-festival appearance in Wales, and carry a certain cult reputation. Of their 11 studio albums to date, more recent ones have been slightly more uptempo, if hardly unfettered occasions of joy. Compare early-set selections like No Comprende – one of the catchier moments on last year’s Ones And Sixes LP – or Plastic Cup, whose subject matter is akin to a semi-developed standup comedy routine, to Lullaby, which dates from 1994 and is astonishingly funereal even by the band’s standards.
An infamously hushed live outfit, guitarist Alan Sparhawk plays through two pint-sized valve amps but can do remarkable things with textured distortion (cf. the aforementioned Lullaby and Pissing, which he concludes by yelling into his pickup). Drummer Mimi Parker uses brushes and mallets exclusively, but both her timekeeping and vocals are wholly crucial to Low.
After the first segment concludes with Ones And Sixes’ unsettling Lies, people seem more restless following a half-hour break. The demand for solemn reverence in a standard gig venue is always liable to hit the buffers at some point, but this doesn’t make the guy whistling shrilly over the intro of nearly every song less of a plank, nor the couple having a conversation behind me until they get told to pipe down.
The person – possibly Whistling Plank – relentlessly requesting 2001’s Sunflower eventually gets his wish, and it’s a chiming natural spring of beauty. Two-Step, from this writer’s favourite Low record Secret Name, remains as sombre and moving as guitar rock can reasonably be. And with three more relatively short selections (including Murderer, perhaps their most lyrically curious moment; Sparhawk is, or has been, an adherent to Mormonism, but only in this song does he address God directly), they finish, apologising for the rules of the curfew.
Low have long since passed into an American indie rock canon, which allows them to draw pleasingly large crowds worldwide, but essentially they’ve staked out their own position in music, and remain peerless.
words NOEL GARDNER photos SIMON AYRE