Heard Here

Low
Things We Lost in the Fire

With the release of each new album, Low faces the inevitable criticism of being a fundamentally boring band. The rhythms are slow and groggy and the music is stark to the point of achieving silence between chord changes. Surprisingly, their new release, Things We Lost in the Fire, incorporates this lethargic minimalism into an album that doesn’t drag out all over the place like most contemporary space rock. In fact, this might be Low’s most consistent offering since 1995’s Long Division.
The best feature on Things We Lost is the duet-style vocals by guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker. Throughout the album, the music and instrumentation are toned down to enhance the strength of each vocalist, especially when they sing together. 
“Closer” is the strongest example, a song that sounds surprisingly folky for a band who’s sculpted its reputation as stubbornly quiet and repetitive. The duet vocals dominate the song, creating a peaceful atmosphere reminiscent of Pink Moon-era Nick Drake but without Drake’s complex finger picking to distract from the vocals, which gently command, “Hold me closer than that.”
Fortunately, Things We Lost isn’t an entirely downbeat listening experience. “Like a Forest” is gentle and poignant, especially when Sparhawk sings, I’ve wasted my breath/On words soon forgotten/Left unattended,” but the drums hurtle the brief song forward while Sparhawk lays his obvious isolation bare, sounding like a chilled-out Thom Yorke.
Parker also steps up on Things We Lost, turning in her best vocal performance by far. Her range and intensity is markedly increased from Low’s prior albums, and when handling solo vocal duties she sings with a clarity akin to Damon and Naomi’s Naomi Yang. “In Metal,” the last song on the album, is haunting and poignant and includes some beautiful double-tracked vocals by Parker. 
“Laser Beam” is Parker’s gem. The song’s brevity enhances its emotional directness, leaving the listener wanting more but simultaneously unable to handle much more of Parker’s melancholy lyrics. The duality Parker creates by singing, “Rest your drunken mind/I need your grace,” over music that emanates total peace and tranquility is eerie and powerfully effective.
Low seems to have struck a comfortable balance, effectively straddling the line between maturity and maintaining integrity. While so many once-great pop bands age, wither and die, Things We Lost demonstrates Low’s consistency and resistance from the omnipresent rut of tedium that so many drone bands slip into. Always capable of creating atmosphere, Low proves on Things We Lost that they can give you goosebumps without sounding cold.
-Nick Stillman

The Willard Grant Conspiracy
Everything’s Fine

The Willard Grant Conspiracy are here, their arms loaded with every beautiful instrument you could want in an alternative country band. They’ve got mandolins, banjos, strings, accordions, organs, pedal steel guitars and harmonicas. Hell, they’ve even got Edith Frost singing backup on a few of these songs. However, the end result of Everything’s Fine seems too planned and especially too produced. Unfortunately, the album becomes a sort of calm, reticent descent of The Wallflowers’ Bringing Down the Horse.
This is quiet music — nowhere in the duration of Everything’s Fine does WGC feel the need to rock out. The effect of the simple orchestration and placement of instruments in these songs is to heighten the importance of singer/songwriter Robert Fisher’s voice and lyrics. 
His voice is full and mellow, a bit whiskey-tinged, never stretching much in range but still complementing the scope of the music. His lyrics, however, come off as predictable, vague and sometimes painful. 
Even the best song on the album, the opener “Notes From the Waiting Room,” contains a few lyrical clunkers like, “Give me wings to fly over deserts/Let me loose where the wild horses roam.” These are character sketches that leave unfinished outlines; the heart painted on the body but the face still blank. The Americana that provides most of the body for songs like “Christmas In Nevada,” “Ballad Of John Parker,” “Southend Of A Northbound Train” and “Drunkards Prayer” is so unspecific that it could very well have been written by someone who has never been to America but has seen a Western or two.
The Willard Grant Conspiracy hail from Boston. Of course, there is no one named Willard Grant in the band (the name coming from an intersection of two Boston streets). Perhaps this is all a mediated reinvention of this sort of part rock/part country music. Perhaps they are trying to take the music into the sort of musical arena populated by bands such as Tortoise, as is hinted in the beautiful meandering instrumental “Hesitation.” This album is reluctant to give a little noise, a little uncertainty, a little soul — all things that it desperately needs. 
Every note here is perfectly in tune, perfectly placed: it comes across as too overdubbed, too practiced. A listener may pray that once, just once, someone would come out and play something dangerous, and while the violin often hints at the beginnings of this, it is too little, too late.

-Chris DeWeese

Sunny Day Real Estate
The Rising Tide

Coming two years after their much anticipated and critically acclaimed reunion album How It Feels To Be Something On, Seattle’s Sunny Day Real Estate have returned once again with The Rising Tide. Featuring the studio-savvy and glossy production of Lou Giordano, known for his work on Live’s last record, The Distance to Here, these Pacific Northwestern rockers who helped put the emo scene on the map have given over much of their energies to arena rock of epic proportions. 
By abandoning much of the minimalism and raw energy of their emo-core background, Sunny Day Real Estate has moved from the art-rock of their last record into much murkier territory. 
The Rising Tide begs to be grand and life-changing but falls short on many accounts. Though songs like “Snibe,” “The Rain Song” and “Tearing in My Heart” burst with sincere energy, and the epic “One” rocks like Pearl Jam with Geddy Lee on vocals, many of the tracks fail to live up to the magnificence the production would suggest. 
Though lead-singer Jeremy Enigk’s lyrics have fallen from the heights reached on the last record to the triteness of lines like “Everything and everyone/And in the end we all are one,” the real weakness of the record lies in the production that sounds plastic and often emotionless. Some of the power of How It Feels To Be Something On was found in the middle-ground the boys achieved between slack and pure pop production. On this record, though, too many songs lose their original punch after multiple listens, revealing songwriting weaknesses that were covered up by over-production.
Don’t get me wrong, The Rising Tide is definitely a powerful and worthy record for such an important band, but many listeners, especially those weaned on their earlier records will find this departure into prog-rock territory tiresome and disappointing. For it is mainly in relation to the earlier brilliance of this band that their new effort comes up short.

-John MacDonald