After 25 years as a band, Low have reached a new high. With theit formation, the married couple Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker broke new ground, bringing unparalleled slow and sad intensity to every note. And yet, Double Negative (Sub Pop), their latest album, is their most radical work, underlining the fact that the band is going through a full-scale metamorphosis. They teamed up with producer B. J. Burton (Bon Iver, Lizzie, and Francis and the Lights) to make an excruciatingly minimal, bare and powerful album. I discovered Low fourteen years ago thanks to Tarnation, by Jonathan Caouette, a mind-blowing and unforgettable documentary made in 2003. Back then, the band had already produced some of its most beautiful albums. For this first autobiographical home movie edited on IMovie, the filmmaker displayed intimate and tragic snippets of his life. His whole life was laid bare through the prism of his mother’s struggle with mental illness and the exploration of his sexual identity. His experience was recorded with a hypnotic mixture of snapshots and Super-8 videos sometimes sourced from his childhood. The soundtrack to these haunting images was beautiful. It featured Lisa Germano, the Cocteau Twins, Mavis Staples, Marianne Faithful and the Magnetic Fields. It also included three Low songs (Laser Beam, Embrace and Back Home Again), which appeared symbolically in the first and final frames, as well as in the middle of the film. When I first listened to Double Negative, I immediately thought of Jonathan Caouette, wondering how he would have reviewed this album. Here is his answer. Continuer la lecture de « Low’s « Double Negative » by Jonathan Caouette »
