Leeds Parish Church is an eerie Victorian relic on the wrong side of the tracks. Stranded between the Bus Station and the River, only the faithful, the dedicated and the demented are making the special journey tonight. It’s still a big crowd. They know there are treats in store and they’re jealously hoarding their anticipation.
Within half an hour the boxed pews, the carved choir stalls, the balconies and the nave seating are full. When rich intelligent music is on offer, the intelligent know how to find it.
GEOFF SMITH is the first, and wholly unexpected, delight of the evening. He’s in the the middle of a cinema tour, performing his score for the 1919 classic movie "The Cabinet of Dr Caligari" Tonight he does two pieces from that work. On the dulcimer.
No, no that Appalachian thing like a skinny violin. It’s a bloody great box of piano wire, hammers, beaters and mallets that makes a noise (with Mr Smith in charge) like a camp full of Iranian Gypsies on ecstasy. GEOFF SMITH’S a scholar, an innovative eclecticist and a dulcimer virtuoso. Part of the eastern tonality is a result of Smith's patented invention of a microtonal tuning arrangement that allows normally fixed-pitch instruments to bend right through each semitone to te next. The whole Church rings and rumbles with a fierce and shimmering series of tensions, overlays and unfathomable explorations. Bass notes reverberate for twenty seconds after being struck. The stage floor is used as a sound board for deep percussion notes and (what sounds like) digital delay sends some spider webs of tremolo skittering up into the rafters fifty feet above our heads. GEOFF SMITH is Mr Dulcimer. It’s a startling and ear clearing opener.
FORTDAX, up next as the previously announced support, has a CD on Tugboat records. Darren Durham, as FORTDAX, is superficially like a lo-fi Moby (but don’t tell him I said so). He spins through an ocean of sound washes and and vox humana choruses, dipping in with Japanese folk song, Leonard Cohen, Ratchety switch noises and body pressing bass notes that make the red light on the pillars in the nave feel like announcements of the arrival of Lucifer. The inventiveness doesn’t sustain for the whole set, but there’s something genuinely engaging about this unprepossessing guy from Keighley. We’re now more than ready for the objects of tonight’s devotion.
It’s just off a quarter to ten, and your reviewer is a Low novice. I have the Christmas CD and I hear bits here and there. I’ve looked wistfully at their minimal calligraphy and one word titles in the CD racks. But people I trust have told me I should be here.
They’re not wrong. Low write and perform lyrically intense songs about the moments when the earth and the stars combine with the flesh and the spirit. They do it in voices you could lie down and die with, accompanied by instruments that spring to a light touch and fill up the musical space just enough to hint at the infinite spaces beyond. They pay attention to each decay of each note: they never play six notes when one will do more.
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And when they get loud, like that pivotal moment in “the lamb”, the volume is truly shocking. I wasn’t expecting it and physically I felt from the inside what “gasped” really means.
Low’s opener tonight (every show uses a different set list) is the magisterial “(This is how you sing) Amazing Grace”. Alan Sparhawk sings “it sounds like razors in your ears” with the sublime rage of a tortured spirit. There’s some of their fearsomely loud guitar too, like a message from the dead, and the voices chime like angels.
Throughout the set Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker (Hollis’s Mum and Dad) do whispering and husky indie voices when it suits, and full-on rich and golden choir singing whenever they chose. These people really know about singing, from the belly outwards. “Lordy”, which they recorded with the Dirty Three in a Fish Tank session, shows the talent off most wonderfully. The delightful “La La La Song” from the new album has a Doris Day resonance and a terrific chorus. But every song tonight is a gem.
I’m really too ecstatic to make proper notes. I count fourteen songs altogether. I’m overawed by the finale “the lamb”, taken from the new album “Trust” (just buy it). Mimi plays huge floor tom notes in time and tune with Zak Sally’s harmonically vital bass. She sings like a wraith adrift, she stands (always stands) languid and beautiful and turns the devil’s instruments into holy gourds. In the close, Alan walks away from the mike, humming gently while Mimi and Zak continue to echo their thunderous pounding with a ritual bow at each stroke. The theatre of the Church becomes a sacred moment.
Sparhawk uses the Church’s natural acoustic several times during the set, singing away from the mic but still carrying up into the last rows with no pa at all.
Eventually the prospct of two encores excite the crowd to shout for virtually every song in the Low canon. With one more to go, Sparhawk says “We’re not a political band. This is close as we get” And they do “violence”. It’s very fit. So good luck and joy to the world, whatever the liars and maniacs do. And thanks to Anna Moulson and the people at Melting Vinyl. They’re getting a bit of a reputation in these parts for putting on uniquely splendid shows in fantastic venues.
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