Low + Dirty Three [EP] (KonKurrent / Fishtank)

A meeting of two of the most idiosyncratic and atmospheric bands of the 1990s -- one looking very Australia, the other feeling very Minnesota -- recorded in Amsterdam, 2001. I mean for you to take "atmospheric" as literally as you can manage, each band's personality an expression of dominant climactic conditions in the place they call home. Low's melodies are chilly, uninflected, and slowly circle nowhere. The husband / wife vocal harmonies of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker evoke the High Plains and open fields of old-time country and western music, and words they sing call to mind a sedated, more Biblical X. The Dirty Three, on the other hand, specialize in sweltering, waterfront dive rhapsodies. The sawdust on the barroom floor is thickened with spilt blood and pints of stout, their colors indistinguishable, and people are groping in the dark here in more ways than one. Warren Ellis' caught-in-the-throat violin, Mick Turner's highly individual take on the blues guitar tradition, Jim White's freely accented dance-hall rhythms... even at its most forlorn, there is something defiant about The Dirty Three's music. And maybe you'd think as I did, which is that, if you exposed these two approaches together, you'd only end up with something lukewarm and gelatinous, like the air in a ruined hothouse. Those stalks that end in huge, delicate flowers are bent double by the weight of the blossoms themselves, and even if their colors are that much more vivid under the light-diffusing influence of humidity, there is something oppressive about the fragrances breaking out all around you.

But, as it turns out, of course these extremes of temperature are compatible, and, dare I say it? sanguine. Each powered by its own steam, both bands produce a sweet but not intoxicating immobilization in the listener, and both blear clarity. Low... a veil of fog, a curtain of ice, a fall of snow that disguises the stars. The Dirty Three... a haze of antipodean heat, a spray of warm ocean, a pouring down of sweat. These sensations may last, but they don't endure, really. What is more significant is that both bands confront all the pleasures and pains of loneliness in their work. In Low's case, this loneliness is a spiritual desolation. God is so far way, the world is fallen, trust must span such vast spaces. The lyrics to the opening "I Hear... Goodnight" can serve as a summation of the Low's particular religiosity:

I hear the cars go by
I hear the baby cry
I hear the darkening sky

I hear the window shake
I hear the silence break
I hear the moon turn to blood

It says... [oooohhh]
It says... [ooohhhh]
goodnight

For The Dirty Three's, the struggle involves disappearing into and emerging out of human intimacies. Every one of their songs truly is a full romance, and I think it is no coincidence that the lead-off track of their self-titled album (first issued on the Torn And Frayed label) is entitled "Indian Love Song".

As for the recording at hand, it was achieved using overdubs. Not surprising given the participants, then, distance still defines these collaborations. But if it can produce performances as lovely and palpably yearning as "Invitation Day" (in which the sun also rises) and the organ-dominated hymn "When I Called Upon Your Seed", then I have underestimated separateness. It wouldn't be the first time. I was also stupidly afraid these two bands would attempt a straight retelling of Neil Young's "Down By The River", arguably the record's centerpiece. But had I forgotten who I was listening to? Of course, they detain original's violence in whispery, echoing guitar, sighing, scraping violin, and percussion thrum and murmur as "lowercase" as anything on Dean Roberts' Be Mine Tonight. Where Young's performances of the song are still living through the violence -- "I shot my baby" -- that has just recently past. Low and The Dirty Three have not even lived through it yet, but can envision its aftermath, feel its pull. The whole track, as long as Young's version from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere but really only drawing upon a fraction of the musical material in the "composition" creates a sense of the imminent resisted. In fact, Mimi Parker's vocal chorus, culminating in a single refrain, basically occupies the territory -- that high river bank -- occupied by the guitar solos on Young's 1969 album. The air is sodden but super-charged, and the storm never really breaks, except in the sight of far-off, silent lightning and the sound of softly falling water that could be rain, or could be the river -- the witness -- itself.

Yes sir, it's such strange weather that prevails 'round these parts. But is it as capricious as it appears to be? My skin and my nose and my tongue scream, "Yes!" but my soul responds with thunderous, "No".

Posted by joe on May 30, 2004 2:55 PM