Low: Classic or classic?

"Nothing But Heart" was our first dance at our wedding 😣

"Nothing But Heart" was our first dance at our wedding 😣

― insane oatmeal raisin cookie posse (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, November 8, 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Ours was Two-Step!

need to make a poll for if you've been a wedding guest and thrilled when the wedding couple (or bride/father, etc.) dance extends beyond the 4 minute mark.

Lol I never truly grasped how slow and long Two-Step was until I danced to it in front my entire family and friends

Realized today that I Could Live in Hope is the only album of theirs I don't have, didn't realize it was so hard to get ahold of now. The 2011 2xLP reissue goes for $250, even the CD isn't available for less than $80 right now. This needs a reissue.

iirc the band was having a hard time getting hold of the masters from vernon yard

Yeah, I saw some references when poking around to Vernon Yard refusing to release them or do anything with them at all, which is a shame.

A friend posted this Pan•American track featuring Mimi's vocals on Twitter - had no idea it existed.

https://panamerican.bandcamp.com/track/code

And MONO uploaded live footage from 2017 of them playing "Majesty/Magic" with Low

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYuHDczYhw

need to make a poll for if you've been a wedding guest and thrilled when the wedding couple (or bride/father, etc.) dance extends beyond the 4 minute mark.

― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Wednesday, November 9, 2022 12:21 AM (eighteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

We did a "Everyone can join them" at some point reasonably early

Next morning we did brunch with both sets of parents and my new mother-in-law was like "What was that song you did your first dance to?" and I was like "They're this band called Low, they're from Minneapolis and they play these really slow and quiet songs, did you like it?" And she goes "Oh nooooo." XD

found a promo CD of curtain at the record shop today. bit of a time capsule. also picked up the great destroyer, which i regret ever glazing over... it's belting.

who else could write a song about starting a pirate radio station out of the back of your friend's ambulance and driving off into the night?

this was tough news for me. I went to see Low with my late wife for our 2nd date, on Valentine's Day in 2003, at the Union Chapel in London. they were one of her favourite bands. by complete coincidence I was wearing her Low t-shirt on Saturday. it has an octopus on it, which for convoluted reasons I don't even really remember, was one of our symbols.

hugs to you, bovarism

x 2!

Realized today that I Could Live in Hope is the only album of theirs I don't have, didn't realize it was so hard to get ahold of now. The 2011 2xLP reissue goes for $250, even the CD isn't available for less than $80 right now. This needs a reissue.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, 9 November 2022 20:50 (yesterday) link

i remember getting those when Plain reissued the LPs except for Curtain Hits the Cast which I've been kicking myself for skipping.

ha, that's the only one of those three I have. I don't even have my CDs of the first two any longer (which is fine). but I'll never give up my Christmas CD.

Hugs to you bovarism

I ordered the Japanese CD of 'Double Negative' weeks ago (second attempt at doing so), solely because it has a 2nd CD with Mimi-lead song called "It's All Been Done". It arrived yesterday and sent me right back to tears.

My husband bought the tape of Double Negative when we saw them in March— still haven’t cracked it open yet, for whatever reason.

I did order a shirt a few days ago, and have found a frame shop to frame the beautiful tour poster we got.

listening to the curtain hits the cast on my stereo really loud
this band was heavy

"was" -> still hard to process this

https://drone-not-drones.bandcamp.com/track/low-2

https://drone-not-drones.bandcamp.com/track/alan-sparhawk-3
https://drone-not-drones.bandcamp.com/track/alan-sparhawk-2
https://drone-not-drones.bandcamp.com/track/low

https://drone-not-drones.bandcamp.com/track/alan-sparhawk

all these only available as part of 28 hour downloads!

This was a nice remembrance: https://pitchfork.com/features/afterword/low-mimi-parker/

Low never had a hit single

I'm shocked that "Just Like Christmas" isn't played all the time every year.

little drummer boy was in a gap commercial

Yeah, but that one is slow and moody (of course). "Just Like Christmas" is pretty and downright jaunty.

listening to the curtain hits the cast on my stereo really loud
this band was heavy

Just note that I’m not making light of Alan’s struggles, but Curtain in particular brings me to a very deep place in my psyche— 19 years old, semi-closeted, living in a small town in Ohio in the winter, depressed, not drinking but on all kinds of pills and hallucinogens and weed all the time, just lying in my bed playing it absolutely full fucking blast and pretending like my body didn’t exist.

It’s a really powerful record besides those associations, but fuck if it doesn’t pull me back to one of the darkest times of my life and make me feel them in some way again. It’s why I love it and also why it makes me cry.

"Just Like Christmas" is pretty and downright jaunty.

Sonically for sure...and definitely not lyrically!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/arts/music/mimi-parker-dead.html what a weird obit.

Extremely strange obit

don't see what is bad about it

couldn't read it, but the visible subhead alone was really strange.

Low, which was essentially the couple with a series of bassists over the years

- ok bullshit Zak was not just a sideman

From the outset, Low was well positioned within the indie rock orbit. The band shared a label, the influential Seattle-based Sub Pop, with archetypal bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden

They didn't sign to Sub Pop until 05, at least read the Wikipedia right

ok I see

I didn’t think the obit was bad so much as it just made me realize that I’ve never ever thought of Low as ever having been a “90s band”

Let alone any sort of counter (intentional or not) to grunge or Seattle or whatever.

It drew contrasts where there weren’t any (as in the grunge example cited) and also didn’t get a lot of the history correct, also mentioned. Just a strange and lazy obit

…and frankly, I know Alan means well, but his quote about Mimi not singing for or to anyone felt weirdly denigrating?!? As if he was trying to accentuate her humility but instead it came off as “she wasn’t that great a singer.” Am I reading too much into it?

Why would there not be a contrast? Low were an American indie band that came out at the same time as other American indie bands, but were very different from them. Seems a fair enough point to me.

Because Low was different from a thousand bands, but no one would cite them as a contrast, let alone a contrast to an unrelated scene. I think it makes more sense, rather than contrast them with something they're not (grunge, pop, IDM, whatever), to do what most obits did and cite their peers and antecedents. Galaxie 500, Codeine, Bedhead, etc.. But even that doesn't really do a band justice that also toured with Soul Coughing and Radiohead.

The irony is that Low is actually as much indebted to Neil Young, the so-called Godfather of Grunge, as Joy Division or the VU, which probably gives them a stronger claim to "grunge" than the Seattle groups, who were often more metal-derived, anyway. (Though of course Alan is into metal, too). Anyway, it's dumb. Low was on Sub Pop. So was Saint Etienne.

write up about the funeral from the Duluth paper

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/duluth-celebrates-lows-mimi-parker-with-laughter-tears-at-funeral

This quietly broke me:

After the service concluded, attendees were presented with what Davis described as gifts from Parker's family. Each family in attendance was invited to take a rose, a printed cartoon drawn by Tony Husband in Parker's memory, and a square cut from a quilt.

"When Mim and Al were first married," said Davis, an aunt sewed the quilt for them. "The quilt was a vital part of their lives, keeping them warm, bundling their children, sitting out on the lawn in the sun, and it provided comfort during the last days of this long, hard journey."

Because Low was different from a thousand bands, but no one would cite them as a contrast, let alone a contrast to an unrelated scene. I think it makes more sense, rather than contrast them with something they're not (grunge, pop, IDM, whatever), to do what most obits did and cite their peers and antecedents. Galaxie 500, Codeine, Bedhead, etc.. But even that doesn't really do a band justice that also toured with Soul Coughing and Radiohead.

No one is comparing them to IDM or pop, but I don’t think it’s totally unfounded to compare them to grunge, which was the dominant alternative rock sound of that era. Only comparing them to Bedhead or Codeine is artificially narrow and does a disservice to all three bands who existed in much noisier scenes in their respective parts of the country. For a short time Zak Sally was simultaneously in a band with the guys from godheadSilo, for instance. Low’s music was their form of punk in that it was purposely meant to contrast against the noisy punk/indie scene of Minnesota. Those are the kinds of bands they shared the stage with.

Touring with Soul Coughing in 95 (though not a noisy band) is a good example of their attitude—they did that tour knowing full well their contrast was going to agitate the audience. (I was in that audience and can attest to the fact that SC fans *hated* Low.) They we’re definitely proactively challenging audiences back then.

Now I'm envisioning the impossible insanity of Low somehow being on AmRep.

Bedhead were on Trance Syndicate which is probably the closest you’ll get to that fantasy

They seemed just a tad annoyed to have to play in between my stupid band and soul coughing at the show we did with them. It was an amazing experience that I'll never forget, but I'm not sure Low was really loving playing in front of a restless rock audience.

It may or may not have been fun for them but i do think they knew what they were getting into.

I didn't mean to say that Low had to be compared to any particular cohort, just that I never heard them as oppositional to anything, really. Maybe at first oppositional to any loud, fast bands? But of course Low did get noisy early on. Still, comparing them to grunge? Like, why? Most bands in the '90s not aiming for the radio sounded nothing like the Seattle stuff. (If anything, Nirvana's Unplugged was them shifting gears to sound more like a band like Low.)

Anyway, the only two I acts I personally ever thought of when I listened to Low was, at first, Galaxie 500 (superficially, mostly because of Kramer) and then later Neil Young (c. Things We Lost in the Fire). But Low mostly ever sounded like Low, which maybe partly explained how they managed to always be good.

tbh -- more as a sometime professional magazine editor than as any kind of expert on low -- i think that nyt obit reads the way it does bcz a higher-up said to the writer re an earlier draft "look, you probably know why this person is important but you have to contextualise it better to readers who have never heard of her and don't really know the world she's from"

the "context" is like a super-basic thumbnail of the broadest idea of a time as a way to position the band to said reader

and it's not a good solution to my guessed-at request for redrafting but it looks less like laziness to me than panic :(