- It's remarkable to think of what Low have been able to create out of the barest of building blocks. Most of their songs are based around a handful of guitar chords played at a pace that ranges from glacial to just pushing towards mid-tempo, all underpinning the breathtaking vocal interplay of core husband-and-wife duo Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker (alongside a bassist to round out the trio, for the past few records, that being Steve Garrington). Their songs are, at their core, almost always remarkably simple, and yet they've been able to fashion a career that, as of 2018, has now lasted for twenty-five years and twelve albums – plus a number of EPs and other experimentations. During that time they've managed to twist that core into all number of different forms and aesthetics, from the sparse early albums that in part defined the indie-rock sub-genre known as 'slowcore', through to stately chamber-pop on records like Secret Name and Things We Lost In The Fire, flirtations with volume on Trust and The Great Destroyer, acoustic alt-country on The Invisible Way, and dense electronic experimentation on Drums & Guns and their most recent record, 2015's Ones And Sixes.
Double Negative, the trio's latest, most definitely fits in with those last two. Teaming up again with Ones And Sixes producer BJ Burton, Low take themselves further out than they ever have before, returning to the various distortions and sonic manipulations of their last record and pushing everything to the extreme. Nearly every sonic element on Double Negative has been mangled with to the point of being nearly unrecognisable, and some have then been pushed a few notches past that. It's not until the third track, Fly, that we get a relatively clear and clean vocal cutting through the mix, not until a few songs later on Always Up that we get a moment of stark clarity without some distorted throbbing pulse around it, and not until the eighth song Dancing And Fire that we get a relatively straight-up, guitar-led, fairly 'classic Low' sounding song.
Between those handful of moments there's distorted percussion, droning bass synths, barely recognisable guitars, pure noise and vocals that have been processed with either heavy reverb, decaying granulators and vocoders, or yet more distortion. It all adds up to one of the darkest Low albums in their catalogue, up there with records likeTrust and The Curtain Hits The Cast. It's also one of their most consistent records in a long while – Ones And Sixes hit some magnificent highs, but some of the songs in the middle of the album were perhaps a bit one-dimensional by Low standards, while The Invisible Way seemed just a bit too comfortable. Double Negative is definitely neither one-dimensional nor comfortable. There are a few songs that somewhat remind of other artists – Poor Sucker sounds a bit like The Knife circa Silent Shout (minus the stuttering drums), while there are shades of The Microphones and Mount Eerie thoughout – but for the most part the record sounds completely Low. It's a testament to the singular nature of the band that they still sound so much like themselves even though the sonic environment in which they've presented themselves in is so alien. At their best, there is no band that can create such humanity from such stark, bleak, icy textures. Double Negative is absolutely Low at their best, wrangling the machines to create something so organic and so beautiful.
- Cameron Smith.