"How many gigs do I have to come to before you play "Like A Forest"?"
Blimey. With their reputation for silently devotional, going on reverential fans, the last thing your reviewer had expected on the opening night of LOW'S UK tour was good-natured banter, crowd interaction and, er, songs about hair lice. But then, as we'll see, Low at The Junction proved to be a memorable night all round.
So let's start at the beginning. Despite being housed in a typically soulless grey cinema/ entertainment complex on the outskirts of the city, Cambridge's Junction venue is a likeably cavernous indie venue (vaguely reminiscent of Sheffield's Leadmill) and as good a place as any for fellow Duluth travellers KID DAKOTA to start making acquaintance with England.
On tonight's form that should prove to a mutual embrace too. They've already started when you reviewer and photographer make their way through the already sizeable crowd and there's only two of them. Inevitably, the notion of the two-man guitar/ drums/ no bass ensemble is gonna conjure images of gritty, primeval blues outfits such as The White Stripes and The Immortal Lee County Killers, but that's not Kid Dakota's bag at all.
Unfamiliarity with the material prevents a more detailed report, but suffice it to say these guys have got bags of presence. Their singer/ guitarist is dressed in a smart brown suit with an infantry-style tie. He has dark, curly hair, round specs and looks vaguely professorial as he throws melancholic chords around the building. He's intriguing in himself, but the band's real star is the drummer. Sat behind the most minimal of kits (snare, bass drum, hi-hat and two cymbals he removes and replaces at strategic intervals), he's shaggy of mane, seriously stubbly and gives off the air of a man who's been unceremoniously booted out of a casino at 5AM trailing IOU's and nursing the mother of all hangovers. The fact he plays like Keith Moon being repeatedly stabbed by Dale Crover doesn't exactly hurt either.
They're joined by Low bassist Zak Sally for the last clutch of numbers and his propulsive four-string provides some welcome beef, but really Kid Dakota are a cool proposition with or without Sally's assistance. They can rock, they can saunter into Americana and they can get all minor-key and melancholic on our collective ass and still come up with a pungent whiff of roses. They proceed to sell a healthy number of CDS afterwards too. Your reviewer will be investing himself in the near future.
Tasty prologue then, but of course the evening belongs to Minnesota's finest LOW. The last time W&H saw them, they were playing to a seriously devotional audience in London, but tonight is a considerably more relaxed affair. Singer/ guitarist Alan Sparhawk and bassist Zak Sally are chatty between songs (Sally even mutters "Oh shit!" when he drops the curious mushroom stool he sits on to play acoustic at one point) and the band are anything but the silent, distant presence this writer had been expecting.
Fine new album "The Great Destroyer" provides the set's major focus as you might expect and a number of its' selections retain the album's muscularity. "Everybody's Song", for instance, gets an early airing and is edgy, metallic and searing, while "Pissing" is robust and enigmatic. "Monkey" is arguably even better. Mimi Parker batters out the song's beater-heavy tattoo on her ultra-minimal kit, with Alan and Zak sliding in behind. Its' surprisingly vsiceral stuff: Sparhawk's Telecaster sending out shards of screechy, Will Sergeant-style noise and Parker harmonising with real force on threatening lyrics like: "It's a suicide, shut up and drive!"
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Not that the spectrally ethereal Low of yore have entirely vanished, of course. Indeed, both the languid ache of "That's How You Sing Amazing Grace" and a gorgeously melancholic "Silver Rider" are among the band's greatest achievements tonight, while Alan's forlorn delivery of the latter's "sometimes your voice is not enough" refrain is one of the most moving moments in a set hardly devoid of 'em in the first place.
There are a few glitches. Alan's Telecaster dogs him with technical problems (culminating with a nigh-on uncontrollable scree of feedback that almost ruins "Canada"), although he struggles with it manfully and refuses to be beaten. Occasionally, too, the lack of muscle from Mimi's kit threatens to expose them, not least on a hollow, lighweight run-through of superb new single "California", which - unexpectedly - is frustratingly thrown away early on.
Nonetheless, they make up for it elsewhere. The acoustic premise of songs like "Dragonflies" and the brilliant "Death Of A Salesman" (sample lyric: "They said music's for fools, you should go back to school") are a neat contrast, as is the band's willingness to improvise as and when: not least when someone repeatedly calls for the "one about hair lice." Alan relents and plays a cute tune with the chorus: "Remember to be nice to people with hair lice." Well, absolutely.
The set proper concludes with the whisper-to-a-scream dynamics of "When I Go Deaf", but of course that's by no means the end of the story as they troop back on for two sets of encores. The first brings a lovely version of "Sunflowers", "Two Step" - played with poise and soul - and an improvised "Like A Forest" after a guy near your reviewer begins a running dialogue about the band never playing it however many times he sees them. I can only bow to his knowledge on that one, but Alan and Zak work it out and run it down anyway. It's shaky, but well-received and much appreciated by the hall.
That would be a great place to leave it, but instead Low come back one more time. "Canada" almost collapses as Alan's sound problems rear their ugly head, but this debacle is soon forgotten as they conclude with a starkly beautiful acoustic take of "Cue The Strings", faithful to the alternate version on the new single. This time they don't come back, but they've already been generous to a fault and to ask for more would be sheer gluttony.
"The Great Destroyer" seems to herald a new era for Low. It's the closest they've yet edged to a full-on pop sound without entirely eschewing the emotive stillness that's been their trademark thus far. Bar a few niggles, it translates pretty seamlessly live too, and celebratory outings like tonight can only help to shatter (mis)conceptions and swell their already obsessive fanbase. That's the way to do it.
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