Out of Africa - Low

There's nothing like the threat of hyenas on the Kenyan high plains to put a mid-life crisis in perspective.  Low’s singer and guitarist, Alan Sparhawk was still a little shaky from his 2005 emotional breakdown and hospitalisation when, in August 2006, he visited the Maasai and a school built thanks to Low's 2005 Christmas benefit gigs.  It's an experience he recounts bashfully, hating the idea that it'll come off like some clichéd "run through of someone's trip to Africa", but carrying clubs for protection, living in mud huts, and the fresh sugarcane, zebra watching and friendships free from Western dysfunctions was a necessary awakening, as well as a focusing jolt to his musical sensibilities. 

"The boldness and the simplicity that's going on [in new album ‘Drums and Guns’] for sure was inspired by that trip," he says, speaking to Gigwise at his home in Minnesota.   It wasn't that he arrived in Kenya as Alan Sparhawk of Low - music just naturally found it's way into his experience.  "This particular [Maasai] tribe," he says, "their music is all verbal.  They don't really have instruments, and so the school kids would grab my guitar and just start whaling on it like a drum and they'd just immediately sing -- it wasn't music unless you're singing."  The same could be said of Low's album -- remove the vocal harmonies and you're left with barely-musical static mixed with the relentless clatter and whirr which sounds like broken machinery -- all as sleek and stereotypically electro as Portishead falling through a crack in the earth mid-gig. 

The percussive lifelessness, folky melodic warmth, and lyrical anger mesh uneasily in a way that actually makes perfect sense because an album about war and violence shouldn't coalesce into something comfortably digestible.  For example, ‘In Silence’ is crushingly beautiful, but set against ricocheting snare that builds to what sounds like the rhythmic detonation of landmines.  In fact, all the album's songs sound like they've been purposely damaged to keep us from feeling OK about what they express.  

Naturally, it took a lot of discipline to make something sound so disjointed, a fact reflected by Low's attitude entering the studio to create ‘Drums & Guns.’  "We knew it was going to be uncomfortable," says Sparhawk.  "We knew we were going to be setting aside familiar instruments, sounds and approaches.  It was really two or three days into recording that we kind of found some voices that we were excited about.  We just knew that if we kept it simple and stepped out of our comfort zone, we would probably be happier than if we went in and did things the normal way." 

However, the album arrangements aren't so crucial that they'd forsake guitar and drums when they play live.   Says Sparhawk, “I personally don't think it would be very interesting to have us all sit up there the whole set twiddling knobs and buttons.  That [electro] element will be there - references that we're bringing in to the live thing with just a sampler and a keyboard.  But we usually play guitars and drums live - it’s a language we've developed over 13 years of touring.” 

In fact, a few of the songs actually pre-date their 'Drums and Guns' interpretations and have already been played live with Crazy Horse grittiness by Sparhawk's and Livingstone's other band, Retribution Gospel Choir.  Live, Low can be a gentler and genuinely mesmerising experience, although Sparhawk's perspective is far darker. "I never get the sense that everybody there is mesmerised as much as I think everybody's going to kill us," he says.  "It feels more like an antagonistic situation and I have to remind myself that 'no, no, no - these people paid money to come see us.  At least at the beginning they're on our side."  It's not so much the feeling that they're being provocative, as it is a steely lack of emotional interchange that makes him paranoid.  "I'm just kind of more aware of the silence and the breathing...  I don't know.  In an ideal situation you do feel like there's some give and take, some interchange that's happened.  But looking at faces and perceiving that is usually pretty difficult.  As wrong as it is, sometimes I catch myself thinking that it’s the three of us against this crowd that's going to eat us or something."