Low / Divide And Dissolve (live at St George’s Church)

Brighton
28 April 2022

It’s difficult not to use words like “hushed reverence” for a band like Low, and you wonder if someone isn’t very much testing that by hosting them in a lovely church. I’m not sure if we’re “post-“Covid, but certainly being out and about, at a gig with lights and everything, is unnerving. I’m pretty sure everyone’s forgotten how to act in public and the general feeling of horror at having to pick seats next to a stranger is palapable.

Speaking of palpable, DJ Johanna Bramli (of Fröst and Johanna Bramli) is playing bangers as we mill about — including the obligatory Tangerine Dream long number in honour of our recently dearly departed. I could’ve gone for a Bramli solo set (I reviewed her record for Freq and it’s still a banger) but I’ll take her no-fixed-abode DJ stylings in a pinch.

Support act Divide And Dissolve are maybe not obvious bedfellows for Low. And to be honest, that’s all for the better — I certainly don’t want whatever “the new normal” ends up being to go back to bills of five roughly identical bands. D&D are a duo who sit somewhere within a land of doom riffing, slow but not glacial, and accentuated with saxophone loops. I don’t really want to throw them in with doom too keenly because, quite frankly, I’ve never seen anyone in metal look to actually enjoy themselves as much as Divide And Dissolve do.

In the absence of lyrical content, D&D’s singer spends an amount of time articulating some stuff — how cool Low and the touring team are, how the world has shifted, how white supremacy needs to be dismantled. There’s an oddity, perhaps, in that the music is heavy and lugubrious, ominous, but the singer talks like a flower child.

It’s seriously affecting and really appreciated that they don’t let their music drift into faceless, personality-less riffing. Top points as well for the upside-down guitar played almost exclusively in upstrokes. Between the Swans-esque minuets, “We would like to talk about how white supremacy is destroying the world” is my top stage patter highlight for the evening.

Low’s set is a game of two halves, in a sense — playing the new record earlier on and then some evergreens later on. “Hey What” is, by necessity, more stripped back than the very studio-produced album version, but it’s by no means denuded (an odd adjective for Low). Alan Sparhawk‘s vocals are often a lot more full-throated, especially when harmonising. There’s an almost comedic “let’s be very quiet in the quiet bit” for big single “Days Like These”. The whalesong outro for “Hey” is arguably a lot more dreamy than on the record.

Sparhawk seems to be me to be peacocking more on the guitar, or perhaps the expanded palette of the effect-laden last two albums has been liberatory. “Don’t Walk Away” is a more stripped back version than on the record and comes with (I think) a whole new extemporised guitar part, all clever harmonic chords. Low are a band that know their way around arrangement something ridiculous.

The second half is a bunch of crowd-pleasers, but I feel like they’re no better received than the earlier numbers — from Double Negative, “Dancing And Blood” in a less distended form and none the worse for it, and “Disarray” catching me off guard in that it’s a straight-up song. They do “Sunflowers” from Things We Lost In The Fire and it is… well, exactly the campfire gorgeousness that most of us fell in love with Low for in the first place. “Monkey” and “When I Go Deaf” represent The Great Destroyer, the latter as last encore, and somehow Low have been on stage for quite a long time without me ever quite drifting off except in reveries.

A fine evening out. My hat, ’tis doffed Low-wards.

-Words: Kev Nickells-
-Pictures: Agata Urbaniak-