Overhead

Yesterday at work (my unexpectedly long working day being the culprit of TMW,TMW's silence on Tuesday, by the way) I bought the "Dinosaur Act" single, b/w "Overhead" and "Don't Carry It All." This was pretty significant for me, the same way getting Teenage Fanclub's phenomenal Four Thousand Six Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds: A Short Cut to Teenage Fanclub was. In the latter case, that compilation was the first time I'd ever purchased a best-of type compilation where I already owned all of the non-exclusive tracks; the three new songs and the opportunity to own "Everything Flows" again after I'd sold A Catholic Education convinced me, and sure enough those three new tracks were great enough (and the disc is a good enough introduction, as a loaner) that I don't regret.

"Dinosaur Act," meanwhile, marks the first time I've bought a disc where I already own the exact version of every song on it. The box set A Lifetime of Temporary Relief collects up "Overhead"/"Don't Carry It All" and of course "Dinosaur Act" is one of the highlights of Things We Lost in the Fire and indeed the band's career. So the single marks the point where I officially acknowledge that Low is one of the very few bands that I love enough to collect. With most acts my focus is on ensuring I own everything I love in the smallest possible shelf space (so, for example, my joy at Belle & Sebastian's EP collection, Mogwai's EP+6 and 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong, which let me ditch 3-4 discs), but with Low pretty much anything I see that I can afford I'll buy.

glenn mcdonald does his usual fantastic job describing the physical single, and as he had since gotten over how blown away he was by "Dinosaur Act" he spares a few words for its b-sides. "Overhead" he says is "an ominous, murmuring noise-collage, Alan and Mimi's voices gliding over loops of incidental guitar twitter and a steady, train-like kettle-drum pulse, perhaps Low's own response to their Bombscare EP collaboration with Spring Heel Jack [which I would still love to hear - Ed.]." The work they've done since makes "Overhead" seems even more typical than it probably was at the time, as it could fit on Trust or (with a little production tweak) Drums and Guns easily. My usual method with posts here is to listen to the song on repeat as I type, and "Overhead" is one of many Low tracks that sounds fantastic that way, one long loop of paranoia and fear. Alan's guitar scraps and Mimi's thud are both well within their musical comfort zone (although the beginning reminds me a bit of "Do You Know How to Waltz?" weirdly enough) but this is one of their darker efforts, almost a quieter brother to something like "Don't Understand."

It also, now that I look at the lyrics for the first time, remind me of John Hillcoat and Nick Cave's tremendous The Proposition. Cave and Warren Ellis' (no, not this one, that one) soundtrack to the film, which I also picked up at work, is an amazing thing and some of the atmosphere of "Overhead" reminds me of it. To say nothing of the words:

Wanted
Bring him back alive if you can
All said
You can tell your lies to the dead
Overhead
You don't have to like what you're fed
Overhead
Overhead

Wanted
Bring him back alive if you can
Trusted
You don't know how fast it could end
Overhead
You don't have to like what you're fed
Overhead
Overhead
Overhead
Overhead

It does sound a bit like the interplay between Captain Stanley and Charlie Burns, and the doom-laden tone of Alan and Mimi (as well as Alan's guitar keens in the interlude between verses) only reinforces the way the song evokes the dully fatalistic, brutal kind of atmosphere that The Proposition has in spades. Of course, the song came out in 1999 and the movie in 2005. But I'm not proposing any sort of direct relationship so much as a kinship of feeling, and "Overhead" is one of Low's best pitch-black songs - I do kind of wish it had been on one of the albums, actually.