Low on a high

Duluth band slips into slowcore

Ed Masley, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. October 24, 1997

The name of the band is Low. And so is the mood, the volume, the number of beats per minute.

At first, guitarist/vocalist Alan Sparhawk explains, the goal was merely minimalism.

"And that seemed to lend to being slower and quieter, just because minimalism tends to dictate less going by with each moment," he says. "We still have pop songs that are three, four minutes long, but being that they're minimal, there are fewer beats going on than there are in your normal three-minute, four-minute pop song."

Formed in 1994 in Duluth Minn., the band was embraced as a slap in the face to the raging sound of Seattle. But Sparhawk says the timing was a coincidence.

"At that point, we had already been playing louder rock and we were just like, 'Wow man, this, at least for us, has limits.' "

He never expected the lo-power trio to do much more than see how far it could gently nudge the musical envelope.

"It was never originally intended to be the kind of band that had songs and did shows and did records," he says. "It was very much a little experiment. But we wrote a few songs around that form and they just seemed to be songs that we really liked and songs that we would like if they were done by someone else, so we kept going. And three, four records later, we're still finding new ways to deal within those same parameters."

Along the way, they may have inadvertently given name to a genre. Sparhawk says the slowcore label started as a joke.

"Our second show in Duluth, a friend of mine came up and said, 'I've got it! Slow core!' jokingly trying to make up a label," he says. "And then very early on, I mentioned that in passing to someone in an interview."

Soon, even bands that predated Low, such as Codeine and Galaxie 500, were bring considered slowcore. Sparhawk would rather be filed under minimal. "Minimalism at least has some higher art connotation," he says. "But everyone has to have a label, I guess. And you can fight it and sound like a jerk or say, 'Whatever, we're just playing music.' "

Tonight, the band is at Groovy in support of its latest, "Songs For A Dead Pilot." Like the band's previous outings, "Songs" is a melancholy whisper best enjoyed at night, though Sparhawk says there are exceptions.

"There are a lot of people who write to us and say, 'Oh, you have the perfect Sunday morning music,' " he says. "But I like the idea of the end of a long and laborous day at 2 a.m. and you're so tired you can't sleep."

One situation in which the sound of Low is in relatively little danger of being appreciated is on tour with a band like Soul Coughing. It was about a year ago that the two bands shared a road map.

"It was very weird," says Sparhawk. "People come to a Soul Coughing show to hear something quirky that they can dance to that's very street. Plus, they're good musicians and we're not, so people were ready to jam and it was often quite a fight."

Playing such melancholy music does have other disadvantages.

"The longest we've ever been out is six weeks," says Sparhawk. "And I remember towards the end of that, I kind of came to the conclusion that perhaps getting up on stage and ripping one's chest open to expose their organs for an hour every night for six weeks straight must start wearing on you."