Listening to Low’s latest album, C’mon, gives you the sense of driving through the desert at night, following your headlights down an empty road as the stars burn with silent intensity above you. It’s the kind of album that makes you feel very alive, very sensitive and vulnerable, and very young.
C’mon, the band’s ninth studio album, embodies the lush starkness of slowcore. It hooks you from the first track, the rich and personal “Try to Sleep.” The song fades in with rough feedback, then blooms into a lovely, recursive melody punctuated by silvery bells in the background.
Against the ethereal backdrop of Mimi Parker’s wispy “ahhs,” Alan Sparhawk poignantly sings, “You try to sleep / ’cause there’s never enough / You try to sleep / then you never wake up.”
A dark, arpeggiated melody of another standout track, “Especially Me,” ascends and descends over the steady throb of a bass drum. The song is atmospheric and blurry, like a radio signal fading in and out. Parker’s vocal melody is slow but hiccupy. “‘Cause if we knew where we belonged / there’d be no doubt where we’re from,” she intones in a syrupy near-growl. “But as it stands, we don’t have a clue / especially me and probably you.”
The album is a beautiful exercise in delayed gratification. As you sit listening to the ponderous intensity of “You See Everything,” the aching slowness of “Done” and the dark synth undercurrents of “Majesty/Magic,” the impatient part of you will shift and fidget, waiting for them to get to the point and achieve the resolution you crave. But before long, you’ll realize that the craving is the best part.
The beauty of Low — and indeed, of slowcore itself — is its ability to stretch a song out to its absolute limits, holding every phrase until you almost can’t take it anymore. The band plays with your patience, challenges you to listen, really listen, to every note. Like Annie Dillard sitting perfectly still in the woods, waiting for the animals emerge from their hiding places, listening to C’mon reveals levels of subtlety within simplicity, and depth within ostensible minimalism.
