In the midst of the world's craziness, I've found myself listening to Low's album Drums and Guns a great deal over the last couple of months. Definitely one of my favourite albums of the year thus far [no, I can't believe I said that either... let's move along...]. There's lots to like; it's brooding, minimal and epic all at once. It's also mixed in a really strange way that has the majority of the vocals coming out of the right speaker... crazy!
One of the things that has me most interested however, is the video for the song Breaker (which along with the clips for Belarus and a remix of Hatchet, both from Drums and Guns, can be downloaded from their website). A simply designed scene; we see guitarist / vocalist Alan Sparhawk sitting in a kitchen, with drummer / vocalist Mimi Parker and bassist Matt Livingston standing either side of him. In front of a Sparhawk is a piece of cake, the rest of the cake and a glass of milk. A minimal drum line begins, and the band members at the rear begin to clap in time. Once the organ kicks in Sparhawk makes for the uncut portion of the cake, ignoring the slice, and proceeds to make a large mess of things.
Given Alan Sparhawk does all this wearing some sort of military uniform, one could be forgiven for thinking Low are making a none too subtle statement about the political state of their homeland. Sure they might just like cake, but something tells me it's a little bigger than that.
[For the record, despite being so-called pioneers of the slowcore genre, it's a term the band themselves aren't very found of. I'd quote them, but you might as well just read the wikipedia article and be done with it.]
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