Music

Low

Tramway, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

IT was somehow emblematic of the relationship that Glasgow enjoys with the Minnesota trio Low that a beautifully poised set should end with a few minutes of ribald banter about the importance of lagging one’s plumbing in the cold weather. I suspect that Glasgow is not alone in the shared intimacy, however.

Drummer Mimi Parker and guitarist Alan Sparhawk have been trading as Low for 25 years now, with Steve Garrington surely on the point of replacing Zak Sally as their longest serving bass-player in that time. Their “slowcore” music has always been built on Sparhawk’s honed ear for melody, the couple’s uncanny harmonies, in which she may often have the lower line, and dramatic dynamics. In that SoftLOUD thing, Low have been as important as the Pixies and our own Mogwai.

The band’s most recent album, Double Negative, attract uniform rave reviews when it was released last year, and marked a radical departure in terms of its production, much less tied to song form than previous recordings. Speculation was rife as to how it would be translated into a live show, and the short answer was by revealing how much of it was rooted in the fondness for noise that was always a part of their practice.

The new material formed more than half of the set here, with only two of its 11 tracks unplayed, and Quorum, Dancing and Blood, Always Trying To Work It Out and Fly revealed as among their finest work to date. But there was some major archaeology of the back catalogue as well, with standouts including Plastic Cup (from The Invisible Way), Especially Me (from C’Mon) and an encore of their gorgeous statement of faith, Sunflower (from Things We Lost In The Fire).

If it was not the most intense Low concert I can recall, it was the assuredly most pleasing to look at, with very clever stage lighting and back projections on three panels behind each of the musicians complemented in the theatre space by occasional illumination of the venue’s “Peter Brook” wall.