In my mind the eerie corridors of St Anselm's will always resound with the music of Low's The Curtain Hits The Cast album. A dozen songs of gloriously bleak, unearthly ballads. Muted and restrained, they were excellent companions to the novel's sense of quiet unease. Just as the novel conjures a fictional tableau at odds with the larger world, Low do so with their music.
They have always seemed like a band set aside from the larger indie world. With their unfashionable religious views and shunning of traditional quiet-loud dynamics (or indeed, any dynamic) in favour of a quiet/ quiet one, the band have seemed an entity not dissimilar to St Anselm's. Where a thin veneer of calm masks an undercurrent of malice and aggression. A whispered voice of doom in a sea of clamorous maudlin theatricality.
The Duluth trio, headed by the Sparhawk/ Spencer husband and wife vocal exchange, are at their most choral on this album. Whispering psalm-like to themselves, seemingly unaware of an audience, or the larger world outside.
The album dates from 1996, a time when Low still sounded unequivocally like Low. Long before the sonic experiments of Drums And Guns, and the increasingly expansive sound which reached its apogee in 2005's Dave Fridmann produced, The Great Destroyer. Whilst it has been intriguing to see the band evolve into the polished outfit of today, it was the earlier albums such as Secret Name, Long Division, and their 1994 debut, I Could Live In Hope, which best established that taut and austere 'Low' sound.
Desolate is an overused word in musical criticism yet it's definitely an apt description of their sound. With muted, paintbrushed drums the music is unashamedly lugubrious in tone. Like two lovers bidding a cruel world adieu before casting themselves upon the cliff face, joint vocalists Mimi Spencer and Alan Sparhawk, trade words as if each are their last.
The album evokes such an atmosphere (another overused word); so brooding and morose yet somehow compulsively listenable. However, one certainly has to be in a specific frame of mind to encounter this music. You must let the darkness in. On songs such as 'Same' Sparhawk verbalises an all encompassing self loathing and apathy, "The same face, same nose...Same words". Whilst on 'Lust' there is no climax that the title infers, just an insinuated release that never arrives. Such songs typify the less is more aesthetic, proving that no more than clean guitar and a voice are necessary to enthrall. Whilst not easy listening it is brilliant turned up really loud in a dark room on headphones, or as reading music, its meditative tone focusing the mind.
As an evangelical worshipper at the church of Mimi Spencer's Voice, this album holds a special place for me, containing, as it does, two of the best examples of said vocal chords in their graceful flight. The first exemplar being the sublime, 'The Plan'. Pretty much as close to a head massage as music can get. Subtly double tracked vocals oscillate around the sparsest of melodies. Just sublime, and along with the 'Over the Ocean' the best thing on the album. 'Over the Ocean' is the second instance of vocal perfection. A creepy ballad duet seeing Sparhawk and Spencer speak as lovers from beyond the grave, together in death-union. The combination of the two voices on the sighed, and elongated chorus is stunning. 'Coattails' is another, only slightly less compelling, reason to become a Mimi evangelical.
However, whilst not their prettiest album overall, or indeed their best, (Things We Lost In The Fire gets my vote for that). It is a strange and enchanting record that evokes, perhaps more than any other Low album, a sense of remoteness and isolation. Setting these peculiar spirits adrift in their own dark, solipsistic world. Mesmeric, and definitely worth revisiting.
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