Low are known as pioneers of the slow-core genre, or what I like to call "intense sleepy-time music." They reached their noisiest peak in the winter of 2005 with The Great Destroyer, an album that boomed with huge percussion and the most distortion they had ever put on guitar. Pushing their sound to such a loud extreme must have tired the aging Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, because their new album, Drums and Guns, is a definite step back from where they should be going.
I suppose the opposite could be argued; that Low is actually taking a step forward by incorporating electronic elements into their normally stripped-down aesthetic. But the tracks that have programmed drums and looped vocals just feel like annoyances, as you're waiting for the real Low songs to come around. It's not that these songs are necessarily bad, they just aren't Low songs. And this isn't an argument against musical maturity and evolution. I've just always felt that bands should mature in a direction that makes sense within the sonic domain they've established. So when Low makes a half-assed attempt at being funky with a song like "Breaker," they're not doing what they should be doing.
It's also obvious that they didn't make as much of an effort at writing songs. "Dust on the Window," a song just as boring as its title, has literally one musical idea with no change at all. And there are several other songs on here, though not all unenjoyable, that just bug me because they're not developed. The most glaring mistake is "Your Poison," which has an eerie opening, begins to get heavy and exciting, and then at 1:13 just ends. The fact that they would cut off this song so early, while allowing "Dust on the Window" to go on for more than four minutes is blindingly frustrating. Low should know better than that, and why they didn't really worries me.
The trouble is that more than half of these songs are still very, very good. Drums and Guns opens with "Pretty People," three minutes of a tense guitar slide and sparse drums with Sparhawk warning us that we're all going to die. "Sandanista" also has some good trudging rhythms. But the standout track is definitely "Murderer," an absolute monster of a song with one of Sparhawk and Parker's best vocal harmony moments ever. When their voices meet at the end of "And I look right through," I want to forgive them for every bad decision they made with this album. It's that good.
But I just can't offer them complete forgiveness. Maybe I was hoping too much for a continuation of The Great Destroyer. Low has been a band for fourteen years now, and it might be unfair to expect them to keep playing the style they've made famous. But there's something just slightly off about Drums and Guns that stops it from being what a Low album should be. This will do for now, but if they're going to keep making music, they need to try harder next time.
