There I was, somewhere on the 134 heading West, trying in vain (again) to get all the way through The Invisible Way, when I started to wonder, “This is easily the WORST studio album Low has released, right? I mean…it has to be. What’s worse than this?” And I drove, and I thought, and for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything in the Low oeuvre that is as unimpressive. It’s too folky. It’s too wussy. There’s that fucking motorik thing that just doesn’t work on a Low record. I was fine with Nels Cline doing the steel guitar thing on C’mon…but this Wilco-ness permeating my Low listening experience is just too much.
So I started by blaming Jeff Tweedy. He has no right producing anybody else’s albums when his own are so banal. The production techniques you hear on Wilco records way too-closely mimic his influences. You can literally listen to any part of A Ghost Is Born or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and hear familiar (read: better) bands in those songs. “I bet right before they recorded this he was listening to Neu! 2” you might find yourself saying during “Spiders.” “What, did someone give him a Gastr Del Sol record for Christmas this year?” You’ll think during the plodding, tedious 15-minute “Less Than You Think.” I know Wilco has their fans — and those fans are pretty adamant about Tweedy possessing musical talent — but I’ve never liked the guy’s music. And as soon as I saw “PRODUCED BY JEFF TWEEDY” on the Low record my heart sank. I mean…for fuck’s sake…there’s a sticker on the front cover boasting the name of the producer AND it’s printed on the back cover below the track listing. Hell, it doesn’t even say Alan or Mimi’s name(s) on the front of back of their own record! Fuck Jeff Tweedy! It’s his fault!!!!
I don’t know, maybe the band is to blame. Maybe the songs just aren’t that good. Maybe it’s the worst studio album Low has ever recorded simply because it’s the worst studio album Low has ever recorded. You know what I’m saying?
Then, transferring from the 134 to the 5, I started thinking…if I had to rank the Low discography — studio albums only, no singles or Eps — how would my list look? And I came up with this. Let me know what you guys think, or what changes you’d make.
Ranking The Studio Albums Of Low
10. The Invisible Way (Sub Pop, 2013) – Best Songs: None. See Above.
09. The Great Destroyer (Sub Pop, 2005) – Best Songs: “Silver Rider”, “”. Eh…kind of a misstep here. At least in my humble opinion. It’s not nearly as bad as The Invisible Way, but I don’t often find myself reaching for it. There are parts that I can appreciate, but of its thirteen songs I might go so far as to say a slim majority (7?) are bad, while the remaining six tunes vacillate between good and great.
08. I Could Live In Hope (Vernon Yard, 1994) – Best Songs: “Lazy”, This one, although still good, isn’t quite great when viewed in hindsight. I know lots of people think it’s awesome, and it’s still as impressive a first record as most “indie rock” bands have made in the past twenty years, but Low didn’t necessarily come out of the gates with a BANG. They were steadily improving over the course of their first four or five records until they struck gold.
07. C’mon (Sub Pop, 2011) – Best Songs: “Nightingale”, “You See Everything”, “$20”. It’s funny that this is in the bottom half of the list, because I actually really like it. I guess that’s the point of this list? That even though this is only their SEVENTH-BEST album it’s still really good. I feel like I have to apologize for ranking it near the bottom, but it’s not a bad record at all. It’s sound is more mature and refined, the tempos are a little quicker, but the songs are still (mostly) impeccable. You start with “Try To Sleep” and that repeating xylophone melody HAS to bring a smile to your face. And it only gets better from there. Mimi’s songs (“You See Everything” especially) are great. And “Nightingale,” oh man. That’s a good one.
06. Drums And Guns (Sub Pop, 2007) – Best Songs” “Murderer”, “Your Poison”, “Dragonfly”. They started to kinda trail off when The Great Destroyer came out, but I thought Drums And Guns was a nice recovery. The powerful songs are as powerful as anything else they recorded post-Trust, but some of the production techniques are cause for waffles on this one. Still, between the aforementioned songs and “In Silence” and “Violent Past” you wind up with an album containing more good than bad. It’s got some pretty scathing lyrics, too. I swear you can almost hear Alan sneering through some of his vocals.
05. Long Division (Vernon Yard, 1995) – Best Songs: “Stay”, “Caroline”, “Shame”. The guitars weren’t quite as menacing yet, the drums weren’t quite pummeling enough, and the tempo wasn’t quite slow enough, and Alan doesn’t really sound like himself yet, but it’s damned close to being a great collection of songs. And there are certainly tracks that stand out as being THE ONES you can look back on and heard the incredible run the band was soon to go on. “Stay”, for example, is brilliant. Mimi’s quivering voice during “Shame” is perfect.
04. Trust (Kranky, 2002) – Best Songs: “Candy Girl”, “Time Is The Diamond”, “Shots & Ladders”. I absolutely hated this record when it came out. I couldn’t get into it, at all. And then maybe five years ago I gave it a listen and I was shocked by what I heard. The diverse tracks had begun to flow together as they hadn’t before. Slow, then heavy. Desperate, then self-assure. I found myself discovering sounds I swore I hadn’t heard on prior listens. And then the album closer “Shots & Ladders” literally gave me goosebumps. I’m pretty sure that — after “Soon” — this is my favorite Low song. It’s so haunting and gorgeous and perfect. What’s crazy is, “Shots & Ladders 2” on the “Canada” single might even be better than the album version.
03. The Curtain Hits The Cast (Vernon Yard, 1996) – Best Songs: “Over The Ocean”, “Anon”, “Do You Know How To Waltz?”. For me, this is where the golden period starts. The band’s third studio album is the first one that I can listen to and immediately hear the unmistakeable Low sound. Intense, sparse, painkiller-slow, beautiful male/female vocals…hell, the non-melodic parts of “Do You Know How To Waltz?” sounds like something you might hear on a Grouper song, but this thing came out almost ten years before Liz Harris’ first CDr! Crazy, right?
02. Things We Lost In The Fire (Kranky, 2001) – Best Songs: “Sunflower”, “Dinosaur Act”, “July”. For a while back in the early aughts I found myself listening to this record A LOT. I was finishing college and kind of in this weird, endlessly grey place (maybe it was all the pills?) and I wanted to listen to Things We Lost In The Fire. This one has almost as many tingly, heartbreaking moments as Secret Name, but it falls just short of that record in its ability to completely overwhelm me with melancholia or hope and all those other crazy fucking emotions one encounters when they’re sitting alone in the dark listening to a Low record. Ugh. The strings on “July”! ARE YOU LISTENING TO THIS!?
01. Secret Name (Kranky, 1999) – Best Songs: “Soon”, “Starfire”, “2-Step”. This album has my single favorite Low composition on it (“Soon”) and was the first record of theirs I heard, so it has for a long, long time owned a special place in my heart that no other album of theirs can ever hope to achieve. It’s their most beautiful and heartbreaking and lushest album, in my opinion. This was the peak.
Low – Stay [MP3]
