The Invisible Way

It’s easy to forget and hard to believe that Low have been doing this for 20 years now. Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker, and John Nichols started the group in 1993, following in the wake of Codeine and Galaxie 500 but eventually coming to represent the slowcore sub-subgenre by dint of sheer longevity. Those two acts have already reissued their entire catalogs, but Low have kept on keeping on. Still, slowcore is an odd sound to buoy such a long career and sturdy catalog, if only because it’s defined by its self-imposed limitation: at its best, that slow tempo can be as intense as a punk song; as boring as wallpaper at its worst. Having hit both extremes at one point or another, the most perfectly named band on the planet have owned up to the restrictions of their aesthetic.

As a result, their catalog is not necessarily diverse, but they’ve managed to find a great deal of variety within this small patch of terrain, thanks primarily to the open-ended nature of the band. Sparhawk and Parker have proved mainstays, with numerous musicians caught in their orbit over time (the latest being multi-instrumentalist Steve Garrington). Furthermore, Low have never shied away from working with producers who bring their own specific styles and aesthetics to their songs. In the late 1990s, Kramer, Steve Fisk, and Steve Albini helped them define and refine their sound; in the next decade, Dave Fridmann and Matt Beckley helmed albums with varying success. All used the band’s glacial dirges as a blank canvas, and Low savored these outside perspectives, as though they knew the band was never quite a self-contained unit.

The latest producer to helm the boards for Low is Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who recorded the band at the Loft in Chicago. On one hand, he’s such a perfect match that it’s surprising they’ve never worked together before: they’re all indie veterans who have come to represent various aspects of the Midwest-- Tweedy the busyness of Chicago and Low the remote plane of Duluth. On the other hand, Tweedy may be the most Americana-bound producer Low have hired, and at the very least represents a departure from Albini’s punk austerity, Fridmann’s art-sprawl, and Beckley’s pop haze. Especially compared to their 2000s output, The Invisible Way sounds crisp and live, produced to emphasize the individual instruments and to highlight their natural reverb. The sustain of the piano is a major component on “So Blue” and “Waiting”, and the Loft shapes the fading tones of Sparhawk’s sharply picked acoustic guitar on “Amethyst”. The album sounds so good-- and so quintessentially Low-- that the music distracts from the occasionally weak songwriting, which is just what it’s supposed to do.

This sparer sound allows Low and Tweedy to emphasize the drama of the album that distinguishes it from previous Low efforts. While “Holy Ghost” and “Mother” sound sharp in their soft-spoken approach, the pace of “Just Make It Stop” is relentless, at least relative to how we perceive the band, with the piano pushing Parker’s vocals to a subtly harried and desperate pace that fits the lyrics. She’s a stronger presence on this album, singing five songs (nearly half the tracklist) instead of her usual one or two. Even when she’s not taking lead, she remains prominent. As Sparhawk ponders the nature of time and songwriting on opener “Plastic Cup”, Parker ghosts his vocals, her voice trailing off of his and turning each line into a question thrown into the abyss.

Parker and Sparhawk sound like true equals on The Invisible Way, as their songwriting, singing, and playing complement each other vividly. Still, he gets saddled with two of the weakest tracks here, which is especially disappointing coming so soon after his excellent Retribution Gospel Choir album, 3. With its prominent, yet distracting proper nouns, “Clarence White” sounds like it should allude to something specific, yet the only thing truly harrowing about it is the steady, unsettling drum tattoo. When every other instrument falls away, that simple rhythm sounds like that old horror trope: the lumbering monster you can’t seem to outrun. “On My Own” begins with a sweet, straightforward melody about the looming fear of solitude, but then blunders into a lengthy outro that awkwardly languishes in some guitar fuzz and wishes you happy birthday 32 damn times. Repetition has always been a useful, if risky tool in Low’s songwriting kit, but here it just sounds jarring, even embarrassing.

Even when it stumbles, though, The Invisible Way gives the impression of a band on the run. From what, not even they can say. But something horrible lies in wait just offscreen, something like time or death or irrelevance or separation. Low are wise enough not to show the monster, which means these songs are compelled by a strange desperation and worry-- as though Low are barely keeping their demons at bay. Nothing on these songs sounds the least bit rote or comfortable, and that’s remarkable for a band so far into an unlikely career. The Invisible Way suggests that Parker and Sparhawk have been able to maintain the band for so long by never making it easy on themselves. They’ve questioned every assumption about what a band like Low-- a band with a very rigid aesthetic-- can do, which has proven a sound strategy for turning a trend like slowcore into a career.