Review: Low’s Hey What Seamlessly Blends the Nightmarish with the Romantic

Low’s Hey What finds the duo fully embracing sonic expressionism while further honing their impeccable songcraft.

Low, Hey What
Photo: Nathan Keay

On 2018’s Double Negative, Low’s Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker refined their earlier, relatively inchoate experimentation with noise and electronic atmospherics, basking in a confluence of hypnotic melodies, heavenly harmonies, and incendiary audiotechnics. Their follow-up, Hey What, finds the duo fully embracing sonic expressionism while further honing their impeccable songcraft.

With a silky melody undergirded by a welter of harsh, alien tones, “Disappearing” is a flawless meld of references to both celestial beauty and an apocalyptic future. On the languid “Hey,” which is reminiscent of Low’s slowcore and dream-pop excursions, splashes of distortion resemble wartime explosions as well as traumatic ruptures in consciousness. As the track unfolds, echoey vocals and tectonic rumbles trigger a string of improbably paired responses: delight and despair, passion and numbness, ecstasy and shock.

YouTube video

“Days Like These” boasts the album’s most buoyant and pop-friendly hook, though the track’s sprawling distortion soon conjures a sense of impending doom. The song’s final two minutes feature some of Low’s more texturally articulate and precisely balanced sonic experiments to date: arrhythmic flourishes, an elegant vocal wafting in the background, and a swirl of static that fades toward silence, conjuring a universe smoldering toward extinction.

Advertisement

“I don’t have to pause/To feel the magic burn/Deep within my heart /Beneath the surface of the Earth,” Sparhawk and Parker sing on “The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing Off),” obliquely invoking utopian ideas and images of death. The track’s soundscape grows more complex as various sounds are introduced and modified, again paradoxically prompting dread and anticipation, anxiety and exhilaration, tension and release.

If Double Negative is, as a friend once described, a haunted house, then Hey What is the home after it’s been exorcised. Inside, two people serenade each other, expressing undying affection as they wander through empty, sterile rooms. The album seamlessly blends the nightmarish and the romantic, interweaving our perennial hopes and the terrors we can’t shake off.

Score: 
 Label: Sub Pop  Release Date: September 10, 2021  Buy: Amazon

John Amen

John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm (NYQ Books), a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the Dana Award. His music, literary, and film reviews appear in such publications as No Depression, The Line of Best Fit, Beats Per Minute, and Pop Matters. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.