Low - Ones and Sixes (2015)

Ones and Sixes is the new album from the Duluth-based trio of Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker and Steve Garrington, collectively known as Low. Ones and Sixes was co-produced by Low and BJ Burton at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Eau Claire, WI. “In our 20+ years of writing songs, I’ve learned that no matter how escapist, divergent, or even transcendent the creative process feels, the result is more beholden to what is going on at the moment. It’s hard to admit that one is so influenced by what is in front of us. Doesn’t it come from something magical and far away? No, it comes from here. It comes from now. I’m not going to tell you what this record is about because I have too much respect for that moment when you come to know it for yourself.” — Alan Sparhawk, Low I spent much of 2002 in Germany, studying literature, collecting new experiences and attempting to process the existential crises so typical of your early 20s. Low – especially their album Things We Lost in the Fire, which I listened to for countless hours – was one of the few bands who helped me along with this. Their slow-growing, minimal, yet expansive songs just beg for introspection. Demand it, even. They cultivate a sense of grandeur and inquiry with their melancholic tone, which, if you’re anything like me, sets you right down in front of the mirror for some much-neglected self-assessment. Is Low somehow The Velvet Undergound’s song “I’ll Be Your Mirror” transubstantiated into band form? As Alan said above, the meanings of the songs are transitory. Even if there was a specific impetus, nothing needs explaining beyond what the song itself reveals. It’s an exercise on Low’s end and, when the music is released, it becomes one for us. Ones and Sixes takes everything Low excels at and dips it in a heavy gold plating of industrial-leaning electronics. This catapults to new and extreme heights the innate beauty their music has always had. It’s a series of contrasts: stunning and menacing, gorgeous and frightening, giving and desperate, and, ultimately, unbearably heavy and unbearably light. From one to six and back again. —Dee Dee Penny (Dum Dum Girls), NYC, June 2015