Low's Alan Sparhawk sounds like "Low's Alan Sparhawk" to such an extent that perhaps anything he would involve himself with would bear the taint of his main gig; Retribution Gospel Choir, his side project with bassist Matt Livingston (also of Low, of late) and drummer Eric Pollard, sounds like Low with more guitars. This mightn't be so problematic were it not for the fact that Retribution Gospel Choir also share Low's main aesthetic attribute - their adherence to funereal tempos - and that Low themselves made the "Low with more guitars" album in 2005's bafflingly maligned The Great Destroyer. (It also doesn't help that RGC cover, however ably, two recent Low tracks: "Breaker" and "Take Your Time" from last year's terrific Drums and Guns.) Neil Young's work with Crazy Horse is invoked here, perhaps inevitably; I hear that impulse behind Sparhawk's noodling, but none of the workouts on debut full-length Retribution Gospel Choir are as languid or magisterial as a "Cortez the Killer" or "Powderfinger". In fact, despite Sparhawk's evident devotion to stately pacing, the album's tracks are quite economical, with most topping out under three minutes, and the two longest tied at 4:06.
A confession: the first, and only time I have seen Low live, they were pretty much as boring as watching paint dry. It was at the Ethical Society of Philadelphia, a stately 19th century meeting hall just off of Rittenhouse Square which was woefully ill-suited as a musical venue, primarily because the stage was so low to the ground (in fact, I don't even know if there was an elevated stage or they just played on the floor - in which case, fuck off Dan Deacon) that everybody had to sit on the floor the entire time. This might not have been so bad, were it not for the fact that opener Mark Eitzel (who I subsequently learned was kind of a big deal as singer-songwriting for the now-resurgent American Music Club) was god-awful and Low themselves were so incredibly late, for reasons I cannot recall. So after slogging through in minor discomfort for two hours, Low played a sonorous acoustic set heavy on cuts from their worst album, 2002's Trust; the twin highlights were the phone call Mimi Parker (Low's drummer and Sparhawk's wife) took on stage from their baby sitter, and the fact that their set was foreshortened by the Ethical Society's policy of closing up shop by 10:00 pm, which might have been another item of complaint had the trio (Zak Sally was the bassist at the time, but has since departed the group) gathered even a modicum of momentum. So, with that caveat, and judging from the YouTube clip above, the best way to view RGC would be, probably to Sparhawk's chagrin, as Low in an awesome, electrified touring configuration. Which is nothing to sneeze at.
P.S. Worth checking out is Low's outstanding 2001 effort, Things We Lost in the Fire, which on its own makes the case for the dramatic possibilities of the so-called "slowcore" movement. On this record, Nietzsche's famous formulation about women applies to the band as well: "They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."
Retribution Gospel Choir Myspace
Low Myspace
