Low – Ones And Sixes

★★★

My eldest daughter had trouble falling asleep when she was a baby and I would have to walk her back and forth in the front hall of our house until she finally nodded off.  To aid in this I would put on quiet music to help sooth her; her favourite piece to fall asleep to was Things We Lost In The Fire, Low’s 2001 masterpiece.  It was soothing, contemplative, and sounded great even when you hushed the volume to barely audible levels.

Ones and Sixes, by contrast, would probably keep her awake (at least until “Landslide”).  The slowcore veterans have picked up a certain level of production value over the years that tends to cancel out the quiet, brush-on-drum nature of their sound.  This album is no different; many of the drum arrangements feels as though they were programmed, rather than teased out, and the exuberance with which they play actually has some dynamic and volume to it, a quirk that has become increasingly apparent ever since C’mon.  “Landslide”, as I alluded to, comes the closest to the twilight lullabyes of their older work, but it’s the odd one out this time, rather than the standard.  In a way it feels as though Low is now a different band than they were when they started out 21 years ago.  Obviously this is true of most bands, but with Low you can really feel it.  This isn’t music to drift off into dreamland to anymore, but rather music to wake up on a sunny spring morning to.