Album Review: Double Negative by Low

Twenty-five years is, as the cliché goes, a long time in rock - even the quiet kind that Low so beautifully peddle. A quarter of a century… That's three Beatles careers and a year off for good behaviour/rehab (delete as applicable). You expect some kind of evolution here, right? The mid-career jazz excursion, those difficult solo years… But thanks to that bloody Christmas EP (1999's Christmas) and a maybe-lazy predilection for a glacial cover version (and hello Mimi Parker's pristine pipes), you might be forgiven for thinking Low were another 6Music band waiting for a John Lewis campaign.

Full Review >>

Double Negative begins similarly to something you'd expect from Tim Hecker . "Quorum" pulsates with trickling static accompanied alongside warm, choral vocals that are being interfered and manipulated with. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker's singing is often cloaked throughout with layers of haze, crackling and struggling along, intermittently coming in and out of focus as though they're trapped beneath something.

Full Review >>

Low celebrate 25 years as a band with Double Negative, a record so unabashedly different to the music they first made their name with, it makes Scott Walker look positively nostalgic. But as ever with the enduring Minnesotans, it doesn't feel like they're being ostentatious. If it's perfectly reasonable to compare Double Negative's chilly electronic snowscapes to those of Radiohead's Kid A, then this album isn't anything so vulgar as a reinvention… Instead they and producer BJ Burton have simply walked further - a lot further, admittedly - down the path they began with 2015's Ones and Sixes.

Full Review >>

Without its companions on the album, the exercise could have seemed like a middle finger to the old Low, but then the cryptic “Quorum,” the album’s opener, drifted into view. Listening to the songs as they were designed to play, it became clear that the fluctuating volume, the interruptions of static and noise were more a deliberate setting for this experiment than merely a stab at reinvention. When we listen to Double Negative, we actively participate in this experiment.

Full Review >>

It is a flabbergasting coincidence that Low's 12th album ended up sharing its name with one of the most absurd moments of Donald Trump's summer. In July, about a month after the band announced their album, Trump publicly backpedaled from a comment he'd made which seemed to indicate to Russian President Vladimir Putin that, unlike the CIA and FBI and the remainder of the intelligence agencies, he didn't believe Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. "The sentence should have been, 'I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia,'" went Trump's revision.

Full Review >>

For the better part of 25 years, Low have been a celebration of post rock esoterica. From the indie kids to the now middle-aged 90s alternative crowd, the band are a conversation ender in that people rarely express distaste for them. There's good reason for this. Not all of the music is good, but the highs are fantastically high.

Full Review >>

On their 2015 album, Ones and Sixes, Low worked with producer BJ Burton, who helped the slowcore icons create an album that balanced the warmth of their harmonies against the cool, polished surfaces of electronic sound that dominated the arrangements. If the pairing didn't always seem a comfortable fit, that hasn't stopped Low from returning to the studio with Burton and making an album that dives further into an electronic netherworld than Ones and Sixes ever suggested. Released in 2018, Double Negative often processes Mimi Parker and Alan Spearhawk's vocals to the point where they function more as instruments than as carriers of language or human emotions (though Parker's organic instrument does get a showcase on "Fly" and "Always Up"), and their surroundings are usually layers of sculpted noise that sound utterly alien, as if this were some sort of aural exercise in dystopian science fiction.

Full Review >>

Before fans even hear the first track on Double Negative — the 12th studio album by 25-year-running Minnesota indie rock band Low — many of those listeners will have concrete expectations. For one, they'll be eager to hear the long-renowned harmonies between founding members Mimi Parker (drums and vocals) and Alan Sparhawk (guitar and vocals).   However, that key Low characteristic is in relatively scant supply on these 11 tracks. There is, however, ample supply of the band's other major signifier on Double Negative — gradual tempos ….

Full Review >>

T hat title is perhaps a droll, knowing joke. You thought the Duluth trio's 25 years of slow, minimalist indie rock was gloomy? Well, now it's doubled down, triple distilled, quadruple concentrated, resulting in the masterpiece that their hugely impressive catalogue has been heading inexorably towards. The breakthrough use of drum machine pulses on 2015's Ones and Sixes has been fully realised, and then some.

Full Review >>

As much as Double Negative will (and should) be praised for being a seismic upheaval in Low's music, you have to remember, Duluth's finest have always had this in them. Even their classic sound, the one that now gets noted mostly for its stark beauty, was downright transgressive in its original time and place, a deliberate provocation in the face of their Duluth hardcore surroundings (there's a reason the "slowcore" genre tag always felt a bit like a joke - it was, just not on the band). And that's not an impulse that's gone away: around the time of 2015's excellent Ones and Sixes, Alan Sparhawk said, "I've made music to assault people and to completely drive people out.

Full Review >>

The search for beauty in dark times may require extra effort, but it is all the more rewarding when it emerges. When your understanding of your country is skewed by events beyond your control, how do you channel that into art? Is it as simple as writing a set of protest songs or is there another way? For Low, it would seem there is. As the creators of some of the most beautiful music of the past twenty-five years, the wilful mangling of melody that lies at the heart of 'Double Negative' is a remarkably powerful reaction and a deeply moving listen.

Full Review >>

Amid great political, societal and ecological anxiety, there's an unspoken insistence that the best art speaks directly to that reality. Recent tumult has spawned a litany of works that hold up mirrors to ourselves and our predicament. But it has also, predictably, become a way of marketing art and music as activism - despite the actual content often falling short.

Full Review >>