What is your tolerance for depression in music? What is your tolerance for moroseness? It better be high, because this record, as beautiful as it is, might well drive you to suicide if you listen to it in the wrong frame of mind. It's not happy music. The first lyric is "When they found your body / Giant X's on your eyes" and it only gets more despairing from there. Low's music is like a black-and-white line drawing: everything is leached out of it until all that's left is a skeleton, the aching slowness of their melodies repeating and repeating. The two vocalists sing as though they thought there was nothing left to live for. I find this album to be one of the decade's most emotionally punishing--you either have to give yourself up to it or ignore it entirely. Not a single song deviates from the general atmosphere of glacial depression except for "Dinosaur Act", and that one's just a little bit louder than the rest--and just as depressing. I can't love this album--I don't think anyone really could--but it is what it is: a celebration of the futility of love and laments for the dead.
MY RATING:
8.8
Low - "Closer"
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