The tyranny of distance

How much do I want to attend one (or more) of these shows? So much that it actually hurts a little. I hope all Low fans anywhere near Houston, NYC, Middletown or Minneapolis manage to get to one of those shows, because this sounds incredible:

Providing the musical backdrop to Thorson's piece, Heaven, Alan and Mimi are providing original music and vocal orchestration. Heaven examines the trinity of dance, music and light while exploring the various manifestations of ecstasy in religious practices and the ritualistic nature of dance.

I guess I'll just hope against hope they make their way to Toronto at some point.

Checking in

Plans have been long underway to get TMW,TMW dusted off and working again, and hopefully that'll happen soon, but for now a little tidbit from maybe my favourite general purpose pop culture website, the Onion AV Club: They included "Mom Says" in their list "Don’t try to wake me in the morning: 36 (mostly excellent) songs to soundtrack your suicide." And while that title makes it sound a bit broader, almost all the songs I know on the list are rather more explicitly about ending your own life. The relevant bit:

The depressives in Low understood the Bee Gees’ pain—they once covered “I Started A Joke” (as did Faith No More, but in a much funnier way). But Low has its own corner of the market dedicated to life’s darkest moments. "Mom Says," from The Curtain Hits the Cast, doesn’t reference death or even despair, but its vocals and lyrics are so haunting that when the final line comes — "Mom says we ruined her body" — it’s almost too much to take.

I'm torn: on the one hand, given the focus of much of the list, I'm not sure at all that "Mom Says" ought to be on that list (and it's certainly never made me think of suicide, although juxtaposing that thought with the closing line of the song makes me shudder a little). But on the other, I love that song and I love Low, and it's hard not to feel a little thrill at seeing them included like that. Partly (sadly?) for the validation of having someone else love what you love but more, I think, because there's this moment of someone reading this article might seek out Low and fall just as hard for them as I have.

I should also note that "Do You Know How to Waltz?" made their perfectly fine list of great 10 minute plus songs (although really AV Club, no "Station to Station" or "Yoo Doo Right"?). I don't know when the AV Club added a writer who loves Low, or whatever, but if it means they'll be showing up on lists like these with roughly the frequency that I'd put them on there, I'm happy.

Glorious appearing

Yes, we're still trucking on here. I have no idea what happened to May, let alone most of June; I've been sick, but believe me this thing will continue to be intermittently updated at the very worst. Once I get some other commitments dealt with I am thinking of returning to a regular schedule to polish off the rest of Low's songography, because this is getting ridiculous! So keep watching those RSS feeds. But I've got quite the treat to tide you over until then...

Thanks again to my friend Erik, who pointed me to this ILM thread that contains two massive MP3s that contain a gobsmacking two and a half hour long set Low played at a festival in the Netherlands. Twenty-five songs, and check out that setlist:

PART ONE:

David Dramm:
01. The Wheel of Catherina

Low:
02. Amazing Grace
03. Sunflower
04. In Metal
05. Candy Girl
06. Dinosaur Act
07. Kind of Girl
08. Point of Disgust
09. Whitetail
10. Canada
11. Belarus
12. Breaker
13. Silver Rider
14. Shots and Ladders

PART TWO:

Low:
01. July
02. Pretty People
03. Take Your Time
04. Monkey
05. Everybody's Song
06. The Lamb / Blood of the Lamb
07. Violent Past
08. Laser Beam
09. In Silence
10. Always Fade
11. Dragonfly
12. Murderer
13. &20 (My Love (is for Free)) [I have no idea what this is yet, no]
14. Sandinista
15. When I Go Deaf (with David Dramm)

Partly as an act of contrition for being so slack, and partly because I'd do it anyways for my own edification, I'm going to get going on trying to break these two MP3s (each two hours long!) broken up into songs and post some uploads of the concert broken down properly once I've got it done. So like I say, keep watching those RSS feeds...

Little Argument With Myself

This is a song, I think, about being angry with yourself. Or at least, I'm angry with myself right now (I'm unemployed and struggling not to waste my days, and what do I do? Fall back into playing Civilization all afternoon and evening, goddamn it), and "Little Argument With Myself" is the Low song that springs to mind.

It's a brief song, occurring just after the most terrifying song on Trust (well, at least tied for most terrifying... we still have to get to "The Lamb"). Frequent blog interlocutor Inverarity (whose blog is better than this one, and not just because he's been more timely with updates) said in the comments here, "I find "John Prine"/"Little Argument with Myself" to be one of the most riveting and wrenching pairs in the catalog," and he's got a point. I mean, obviously this track is in some ways a relief when it comes on, but you can't really pull out of your defensive posture until "La La La Song," can you? But whereas "John Prine" is gnomically horrifying, sealing off even the possibility of a little light, "Little Argument With Myself" at least begins and ends gently.*

For once songmeanings might have actually added something to my understanding of a song - having been raised secular, I do worry sometimes that I miss Biblical stuff in Low songs, and one elwyn5150 tells me that the narrative here stems from Genesis 15:5. The song starts with just Alan intoning "I want to believe, yes I want to believe" twice, Mimi joining in the second time. Only a typically retiring guitar line underlies their voices. As the meat of the song starts up, that guitar at first ebbs out of view before coming in with greater force along with a tuba(!) and an increasingly strident vocal performance from Alan and Mimi, and eventually the rising tide of cymbals and a kick drum...

Just keep counting the stars
Like someday you'll find out
Just how many there are
AND WE ALL CAN GO HOME
'CAUSE THERE'S NOTHING AS SAD
AS A MAN ON HIS BACK
COUNTING STARS

They don't actually start yelling, but it's so intense I don't quite now how to represent it without capitals. In isolation it's actually still a pretty restrained song, and just as it crescendos everything dies back down for the two of them to repeat "but I want to believe, yes I want to believe / 'cause there's nothing as sad
as a man on his back / counting stars" as the track fades out.

I don't need to talk about how bitterly this narrative seems to treat faith and self-delusion, do I? It's an awfully dark take on the doubt Abraham must have felt when God told him how many kids he'd have, even for Low. And while it never gets that loud or that harsh, after the end of "John Prine" even the thought of someone yelling at you, even a little, is likely to interfere negatively with your bruised psyche. Alan is mostly yelling at himself (well, the narrator), but there's collateral damage. And he hates that he's just a man on his back counting stars, but there's something almost Kierkegaardian about the song (and honestly, I imagine there are ways in which Alan's faith is deeply indebted to Kierkegaard): He wants, or needs, to believe so that he's not just wasting his time, and the force of that belief, of that leap of faith, is sufficient for it to be true. I hope it's not the case that the middle section here isn't just a strawman version of the bluff empiricist, mocking the person of faith; given Alan's own doubts and fears, it deserves to be (and feels more) internal. And that, of course, is why it's a little argument with yourself, the struggle we have with the internal voices of doubt (whether it's about religion or not). Separate from Abraham and Genesis, the song is a wonderful metaphor for something we all do; I don't count stars, but there are things I do because I am basically taking it on faith that they are the right things for me to be doing with my life right now. And every so often part of your brain sneaks up and tells you, you're just a man on your back counting stars.


*(all that being said, I'm still terrifically curious to hear more about the connection Inverarity hears between the two songs...)

I Remember

this is secretly one of our favourites

I'm not sure whether Alan's liner notes to the b-side version of "I Remember" found on A Lifetime of Temporary Relief are just indicating that alternate version of the opening song from Secret Name or to "I Remember" in general. I kind of hope it's the latter.

No disrespect to the version they recorded with Mimi singing lead for the UK "Immune" single. The drum machine and odd organ tones make for a striking arrangement, and of course Mimi herself sounds great. But for a record that at the time I'd been told was Low's loveliest, to come to Secret Name through a haze of muted optigan organ distortion (not, Alan takes pains to say, samples of record hiss), faraway kick drum and snare tap and Alan's exceedingly carefully placed guitar notes... "I Remember" in its primary form is a thing of total desolation, right down to Alan's high pitched but muted delivery of the song's few lines.

None of the notes in the box set or on Low's old web page reveal much about what's going on here, and even for Low at the time "I Remember"'s lyrics reach new heights of opaqueness and brevity:

I remember every number

I remember graduation

I remember painted faces

No they couldn't believe it was you
I knew

To have that be all that was said, to leave the last two minutes of a four minute song with nothing more than the odd guitar note (played on Gavin Rossdale's guitar, for whatever reason, and taken by Alan as more "evidence that i'm a pitiful guitar player," despite sounding fine to me) and the tender thump of the kick drum in Mimi's mini-kit... it's both somewhat frightening and oddly comforting. This, then, was a band not interested in coddling the listener, one that full realized how lush even something like "I Remember" could be in the right context. It also for the first time highlighted for me the menace lurking implicit in many of the songs on Things We Lost in the Fire - that couplet of "No they couldn't believe it was you / I knew" is redolent of crimes gone unpunished, or small town whispers, or just pasts you try to forget. In some ways it's almost paradigmatic in terms of the oblique violence lurking under much of Low's material at the time.

The b-side version injects too much warmth and colour into the arrangement to have quite the same effect, although without the example of the album version I would probably think it just another good, possibly even great Low song. But as it is this version just isn't cold enough, or stark enough, or harsh enough, to hit me as hard as the original. I can't think of any way to convey that effect to you except to note that, at one point, I stumbled upon this image under a long-forgotten context and all I could think was that it looks the way the Alan-sung "I Remember" feels:

Santa's Coming Over

This song is terrifying. Up until the last verse, where the lyrics change a bit, it's also one of the bigger mismatches I've ever heard between lyrical content and lyrical delivery. Picture a song about waiting for Santa to come with presents, delivered a bit like a hybrid between "John Prine" and horror movie soundtrack music. When the drums come in, I got a little shiver. And the video! Those kids! When they start singing along, I thought something really bad was going to happen. It helps than Alan and Mimi's vocals are the most off-key and unsettling I've heard in a while, maybe ever. And while their site still features a picture of the band with Matt Livingston in it, if he has quit it's reflected in the fact that there seems to be almost no bass in this track.

I just heard about this song today, and so you are getting my very first reaction to it, but god it's a powerful track. I really hope this doesn't stay just a vinyl/download single, I could see this working on an album. Kudos to whoever did the video as well, it's very striking and immediately effective (especially the end of it, god).

Heartbeat

Ye gods, it's been a while. Sorry. You sort of get out of the habit of doing these, and then.... come to think of it, this time of year seems to have been bad for my colleagues, some of whom are still plugging away and whose work I enjoy. There is one notable exception in terms of productivity: Matthew Perpetua's excellent Pop Songs 07-08 (lest we forget, the R.E.M. blog that got this whole thing rolling) has recently been completed for the moment, and in the most spectacular fashion imaginable: Michael Stipe graciously agreed to answer questions (including one of mine). So kudos and thanks again to Matthew.

As for here... well, I always say I intend to be better about posting, and it's true, but I certainly don't know what's going to happen. Except to say that as long as I'm still around, Too Many Words, Too Many Words will continue to plug away at the work of Low until I'm damn well finished.

And thus we come to today's song. I saw Wire live recently, although they didn't play "Heartbeat." I actually upgraded at the show - thanks to some birthday money, I bought the 1977-1979 box that covers their three albums from that span plus some live material. Between the rate at the show and the amount I got for selling Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154 (my favourite) at work, it was very reasonable. So I've certainly been thinking about Wire a fair amount recently, and it seemed sensible to cover Low's Wire, err, cover here.

Except when I actually compared the songs side by side, I started wondering whether we should really be calling it a 'cover.' The Wire version sounds like this:



If a bit more subdued on the album itself. Also, the album version, which I would have assumed was the only one Low would have heard by the time they set out to record their version of it, doesn't have any of the scraping guitar noise that's present near the end of the live version of the song here. Low's take was recorded at four in morning in early 1994 by friends in the band Eggs at American University for a possible b-side to "Violence" (neither song fit on the proposed 7", sadly). It then sat unmastered until 2004 when it was polished up for Low's box set. Any band willing to tackle both Wire and Joy Division (and able to give credible takes on both) is well worth respecting, but understandably "Heartbeat" has some rough edges.

I'm not sure whether it was a deliberate decision or not (although given the hour and the possible spontaneity of the recording session, I suspect the latter), but Mimi doesn't sing the lyrics to "Heartbeat" as Colin Newman did. The version on Chairs Missing and the above video goes:

I feel icy
I feel cold
I feel old
Is there something there behind me?
I'm sublime
I'm sublime
I'm sublime

I feel empty
I feel dark
I remark
I am mesmerized
By my own beat
Like a heartbeat
Like a heartbeat
Like a heartbeat
Like a heartbeat
In it's own beat
Like a heartbeat
Like a heartbeat
Like a heartbeat

Low's "Heartbeat" is arguably identifiably the same song (similar, although slower and quiter bass thrum; same melody line; similar lyrical structure), but Mimi sings instead:

I feel old
I feel cold
I'm so blind
Is there something there behind me?
Like a movie

I am mesmerised by my own beat
Like a heartbeat
Like a heartbeat
Like a heartbeat
Like a heartbeat

This is a cover the way you might do it, singing to yourself in the shower. The gist is retained, but the details are very different. The guitar is more granular, the room sound is heavy, and after Mimi stops singing the track dithers for a while before something (an idling vehicle? a faulty washing machine? a deliberate effect?) slowly overwhelms the track in a similar but more total and less abrasive way as the scraping sounds on Wire's live performance of "Heartbeat" above.

This cover retains the spirit well enough, in fact, that until I played them back-to-back to write this entry, I would have assumed that Mimi sings basically the same thing Colin Newman did. He detached melancholy is different from his diffident spitefulness, but both songs are claustrophobic in their inward turn (and both, in fact, seem to implicitly criticize this lack of contact with outward humanity). For all I know, Low's "Heartbeat" is a fluke, brought on by spur of the moment decisions and fatigue, but it feels like the most faithful treatment Wire could have hoped for.