Slowcore legends Low bring 20-plus years of weirdness to City Winery

It Might Get Quiet

Charlie Zaillian, Nashville Scene. February 11, 2016

Low singer-guitarist Alan Sparhawk and singer-drummer Mimi Parker have been making slowly paced, tonally rich music for their entire adult lives — not only that, they've known each other since they were 9 years old. Even after 22 years and 11 full-lengths together — and two children — indie rock's foremost husband-and-wife career band not named Yo La Tengo is still finding ways to reinvent its trademark sound, and new audiences to bring it to. They'll play City Winery on Friday in support of their latest Sub Pop LP, last fall's Ones and Sixes.

"We're always working on something, so even a month off from playing [live] is [unusual] for us," Sparhawk tells the Scene in a phone interview conducted just after New Year's. "The little pause the world just took there was more noticeable this year. It felt like a couple days of limbo, that I couldn't quite figure out where to point myself. You get used to always having something coming up."

At the moment, he's looking ahead to Low's upcoming first-ever show in one of the few cities as chilly as its native Duluth, Minn.: Anchorage, Alaska. "Kind of intense," he says with a laugh. "A little weird to be going there in January, but it should be interesting."

While he's a wildcard as a performer — stoic some nights, chatty others — Sparhawk's onstage conduct has never been a lightning rod for debate like, say, his friend (and fellow '90s "slowcore" pioneer) Mark Kozelek's. When he joined Kozelek on second guitar and backing vocals at a show in Duluth in 2014 for a rendition of the Sun Kil Moon main man's then-new "diss track" "War on Drugs: Suck My Cock," Sparhawk opted not to sing along to the whole chorus, just the word "drugs" — much to the hometown crowd's amusement.

But one on one, the 46-year-old musician is less reticent — or at least he is when we reach him at home, a couple days before he, Parker and bassist Steve Garrington leave for the third U.S. leg of the Ones and Sixes tour — especially when we get to discussing Low's most headline-grabbing moment in recent years.

In the summer of 2013, having already toured extensively behind their 10th album, The Invisible Way, the trio decided to change things up for their set at Rock the Garden, an annual all-day outdoor fest at Minneapolis' Walker Arts Center — the biggest stage they'd ever played in the biggest city in their home state, but for an audience that hadn't necessarily come to see them specifically.

"We've played Minneapolis a million times," Sparhawk explains, "so we were definitely like, 'Let's do something a little more unexpected, more interesting, something really cool for people who have seen us and people who haven't."

The choice of an extended half-hour-long version of the ambient, arty, already 15-minute suite "Do You Know How to Waltz?" off 1996 fan-favorite LP The Curtain Hits the Cast, capped by Sparhawk's quotable sign-off "drone, not drones" — cribbed from a political bumper sticker made by a friend — wasn't meant to antagonize, he says. But some took it that way.

"The show was being broadcast on the radio, a station where normally you're hearing your local, friendly alternative rock, basically had this white-out for 30 minutes. Someone literally started a 'Fuck Low' Twitter account while we were playing the song. The station had to have special meetings, editorials in papers, talking about it. ... It sparked this whole community-wide discussion of, 'What is art, and what is its obligation to its audience?' It taught us a lot about the immediacy of media now."

The set lists for Low's "regular" shows tend to lean heavily on the current album, in this case Ones — which, following the roots-y, Jeff Tweedy-produced The Invisible Way, revisited a similarly austere sonic palette as one of its more challenging, the seething, Iraq War-era Drums and Guns. Sparhawk isn't sure whether he's got another record that angry in him, but agrees that the Ones stuff goes well with the band's mid-Aughts material — set list staples like the cathartic "Monkey" from 2005's The Great Destroyer and sobering "Murderer," originally released on a 10-inch in 2003, then reworked on Drums. The latter song is, to him, "always very close to the bone. There's always new examples of the struggles — violence, and religion, martyrdom, murder. Unfortunately."

 It's something of a feat that Low, a group that's never pandered to short attention spans, is as popular as it's ever been — Invisible was among the best sellers of its career. And in an era of crowds watching shows through screens, their fans are consistently some of the most attentive out there.

Not that Sparhawk demands such undivided reverence — you don't stay together as a band as long as they have by sweating the small stuff. "Even if the audience does get weird, it's never been a big deal or a problem for us," he says. "I guess we don't feel entitled to silence, to complete attention. We're not as sensitive about it as I think maybe traditionally people thought quieter [musicians] might be."