Low Bridges the Indie-Rock Gap

Dan Nailen, Salt Lake Tribune. April 6, 2001

Low, a Minnesota trio, is an exception to the rock 'n' roll rules -- it enjoys immense indie credibility even after recording "The Little Drummer Boy" for a holiday Gap ad.

Low records with uber-hip producer Steve Albini (Nirvana, PJ Harvey), draws comparisons to greats like the Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo, and garners borderline-insane devotion from fans of its delicate, dark treatises.

The group -- guitarist Alan Sparhawk, drummer Mimi Parker and bassist Zak Sally -- earned its reputation as one of the more intelligent of indie-rock acts with nary a mention that Sparhawk and Parker are a married Mormon couple with a year-old daughter.

It's hard to think of another alternative music act that regularly shows up on magazine covers that also has Mormon roots.

Sparhawk lived in Springville until he was 9, then moved to Duluth, Minn. He returned to Utah County for his freshman year of college at BYU, but, he told Jane magazine, he was "a drug-addled wreck" after that one year, and he returned to Minnesota to straighten out and continue college.

"It was all right," Sparhawk said in an interview, describing his year on the Provo campus. "It was not the right thing for me at the time. Ironically, you find there's almost more trouble to be had in Utah than the Midwest."

Sparhawk met Parker when he went home, and the duo eventually added Sally to form Low. Now on their sixth full-length album, last year's "Things We Lost in the Fire," Sparhawk and Co. have a sound distinctly their own. The new album, though, features Low in perhaps a more experimental mode.

"We started from the beginning imposing these restrictions on ourselves," Sparhawk said. "In a nutshell, it involved writing a song and then trying to fit it into what, in our minds, Low should be. On this album, we'd written maybe half the stuff and we realized we had a lot of songs that wanted to be more up-tempo. More pop."

For Low newcomers, new songs like "Sunflower" or "July" will hardly seem like pop music, which is an indication of how languid the songs were in the past.

"I don't think it comes off as an immensely different-sounding record," Sparhawk said. "If anything, it's kind of a testament that we can allow ourselves to do that and it's still kind of us."

Producer Albini noticed the difference in the songs and the band's attitude when they gathered to record in July 2000, four months after Parker gave birth. Albini told Sparhawk the group seemed more confident, not afraid of anything.

"Which is kind of contrary to what I remember," Sparhawk said, laughing. "I remember the whole time really second-guessing, thinking, 'Oh man, are we making a really big mistake here?' "