I came late to appre­ci­at­ing Low, but they have since become one of my favorite bands. I was vaguely aware that trainspot­ting music crit­ics had chris­tened a new genre to cat­e­go­rize bands like Low: slow­core, the dis­tin­guish­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of which being play­ing very qui­etly and slowly (an over­gen­er­al­iza­tion, it turns out, but it never hurts to be famous for some­thing unique). “Venus,” a free pro­mo­tional MP3 from A Life­time of Tem­po­rary Relief given away on Amazon.com, lived in rota­tion on my iPod for some time, and finally con­vinced me to buy the 2005 album The Great Destroyer. I first saw them live in Brooklyn’s McCar­ren Park Pool in 2006, sup­port­ing Iron & Wine (whom I like well enough, but if you ask me it should have been the other way around). Even in direct sun­light, their music is beau­ti­ful and engross­ingly enigmatic.

Thrill to the sounds of slow­core leg­ends tun­ing up

Direc­tor Sebas­t­ian Schrade’s doc­u­men­tary Low in Europe was filmed on their 2002–2003 tour of Europe, before they wrote and recorded my two favorite albums of theirs: The Great Destroyer and Drums and Guns. It’s part con­cert film and part doc­u­men­tary, but not enough of each. There are no com­plete musi­cal per­for­mances included, and although the prin­ci­pals are all intel­li­gent and inter­est­ing, the fact is the inter­views are some­times a lit­tle less than gripping.

The band first expresses their ambiva­lence about oper­at­ing within the com­mer­cial music indus­try. They address their rep­u­ta­tion for slow tem­pos and low vol­ume with good humor; in their early days, they played really slow, in the fuck-you avant-garde spirit but not the loud ‘n’ sloppy let­ter of punk, to antag­o­nize and chal­lenge the audi­ence. Their con­trary nature extends to their per­sonal lives: prin­ci­pal mem­bers Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, prac­tic­ing Mor­mons and a long­time mar­ried cou­ple, tour with their chil­dren and view it as a sim­pli­fied and focused way of life. This came as some­thing of a sur­prise to this Dork Reporter, whom feels per­haps he had a hereto­fore undis­cov­ered prej­u­dice that Mor­mons couldn’t be rock stars.

Over to you, Alan

The heavily-documented Low can be fur­ther inves­ti­gated on the three doc­u­men­tary shorts included with the A Life­time of Tem­po­rary Relief boxed set, and on the forth­com­ing You May Need a Mur­derer, a new doc com­ing out June 3.

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Offi­cial movie site: www.low-in-europe.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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   Low: You May Need a Murderer
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5. 
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