Double Negative By Low Is The Soundtrack To Our Terrifying New Reality
“it’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope”
Tristan Young @talltristan
On Jan 27 2017, President Trump implemented the first of several Muslim bans, barring entry from countries with majority Islamic populations. People litigated the rationale and proper terminology for the edict, but we all know what it was. After the increasingly surreal and concerning year that was 2016- a year that saw both Brexit and Trump’s election unbelievably come to fruition- the trending joke was that 2017 would offer a bit of normalized respite from a very bad year. Instead, the travel ban was the first of many horrible indignities and traumas unleashed by a cruel and childish President. Immoral profiteering day in and day out, foreign collusion, family separation, astonishing levels of xenophobia during the mid terms, hijacking the national security apparatus to extort other countries. Every year was, somehow, worse. The joke now is that 2016 seemed comparatively like a walk in the park. This was before the Coronavirus broke the world, relegating such partisan struggles to naively better times.
The responses to the violations of rule of law and human rights- not just in America, but also in China, South America, Canada, have been truly inspiring. The airports flooded with protesters almost immediately after the first ban was announced. The Women’s March of 2017, standing up against Trump’s draconian assaults on female rights, amounted to one of the largest gatherings of people in global history. The mobilization of disenfranchised and disaffected voters in the 2018 mid terms was a historic accomplishment. Chinese demonstrations against unlawful extradition to the main land were acts of bravery overshadowed only by how ubiquitous they were. The extents to which morally responsible individuals have organized and pushed back against an increasingly Orwellian dystopia has been remarkable. All of the people involved deserve praise.
None of it worked. Not really. The populist (read: nationalist) leaders of the world have only consolidated their power, rendered it more and more entrenched. Income inequality continues to spiral out of control insuring there are less and less options to combat the malignant corruption at the highest levels of governments. All of the demonstrations, the protest art, the momentous statements, the record-breaking numbers at gatherings to highlight the ills of our society- it hasn’t worked. Where does that leave us? How do we process such un-mitigating despair? Where do we find hope in all of this, should we stop bothering to look?
These are the answers that Double Negative, the 2018 LP by Minnesota experimental (we’ll leave it at that for now) group Low aims to answer. These aren’t easy conclusions for us to reach, not just because they are comprised of myriad issues interlaced amongst even more competing biases, but because we as individuals lack the means to process trauma on such a large scale. We don’t have the acumen or lexical grasp to fully articulate the extent to which our world has been irrevocably damaged in just half a decade. Double Negative has found a way to grasp those abstract notions and effectively draw them. The album explores the edges beyond the limits of where vocabulary can take us when trying to understand the utter demoralization of the modern age, and it finds a way to describe what’s beyond those edges. Past the boarders of easy comprehension lays all of the energy and love and tears and blood and sweat people have poured into making the world a better place. The world has taken that energy and mutilated it; discarded it in scattered, broken pieces.
Low found those broken pieces where the rest of us couldn’t and from them constructed Double Negative. An ugly, disfigured, jagged rendering of soundscapes that brings voice to the anxieties and fears so mounting that no one individual could scream loudly enough to describe. It expresses these feelings for us, and thus is oddly comforting and cathartic because of it. For all the aberrant horrors that comprise Double Negative, buried deep within it are the seeds of something luminescent and beautiful. That the acute clarity of this message is offered through such lacerated distortion is a triumph rarely achieved in music, or any medium.
Dating back to 1993, Low, the Minnesota project of primarily Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, has undergone several transformations in the nearly 30 years since inception. Sparhawk spent the 80s and 90s bouncing around various groups when he and at the time band mate John Nicolas, in a rock band called Zen Identity, joked about the idea of experimenting with low key down tempo minimalist melodies for their live set. This was about as far removed from what the post punk Minnesota scene wanted- they just felt like messing around. After trying it out, the joke took a turn for the deathly serious, and the DNA for Low was written. From there, the project evolved from a low tempo meditative blues/rock/country outfit into something borderline indescribable with Double Negative. Rather than genre descriptors this album is best understood through sensory inputs- coarse, distortion; and pure emotion- shell-shocked, despair, heartbreak.
Released in 2018, Sparhawk and Parker- devout members of the Mormon faith, and a refreshingly progressive representation of it at that- undertook Double Negative in part as response to the way Trump was swiftly transforming America and the world. If societal norms and understanding of basic human decency would be so thoroughly degraded to the point of being almost unrecognizable, their response would be emblematic of that. In pursuit of that, the album is a highly distorted sonic experience, serrated even. The opening Quorum, is fluttering with coiled up sonic decay, static and fuzz layered upon layers, growing more invasive and jagged with each successive sequence. The gothic and haunting incantations of Dancing and Blood quiver with throttled reverb and drowned out warbles. Pounding, prehistoric percussion oscillates between glacial lumbering and writhing torment in Always Trying to Work It Out and Rome. The pulsating, exotic drones contaminate the keys as much as the incantatory lyrics of Disarray. Adding elements of experimental electronica, Tempest is a daunting realization of intent, with a burnt out and zombified beat, vicious audio contusions streaked across the desperate pleas of Parker and Sparhawk, drowning in a flood of melting decay.
This was achieved not just through the insular vision of the core members of Low, but through the unique production process that was helped cultivated by veteran producer BJ Burton. Burton had recently worked with Bon Iver on their reinvention, and also pointedly asymmetrical, project 22, A Million. Rather than offer Burton full-fledged ideas to be refined and reformed, Low would come to Burton with only rough sketches of tracks. Burton would be invited to fill in the blanks with pieces where he saw fit. The group would then dismantle, reconstruct, and dismantle again. The components of these ideas were dismembered and reattached so that the seams of each part became glaring and coarse through lines within their songs. In doing so Burton became something of a defacto member of Low during the process of piecing together Double Negative. Detailing this process is crucial in understanding the dysmorphic foundations the whole experience is built upon.
On paper this of course sounds wretched, and aesthetically speaking that’s the point. Even as the static distortions cut unnervingly deep, it’s only part of the atmospheric dread that makes the collection so affecting. All of our formerly inchoate fears of where life is leading us are projected as ancient terrors amid the ritualistic drums and ghostly echoes of Dancing and Blood. The pulsating and irregular base of Fly is a destabilizing influence amid a bleak confession of giving up on your body and life as offered by Parker. That she offers this confession with such resolute stoicism makes it even more wrenching. The actual melodic core of Tempest flirts with sweetness, but is slowly immolated by the scorched production; the two concepts are forcibly bound together, so damaged by their own friction in a harrowing manner. The escalating discontent in Sparhawk’s once meditative voice in Dancing and Fire grows more concerning with each subsequent listen. The pure atmospherics in Poor Sucker, achieved through rhythmic lyrical urgency and direly minimalist piano, conjures whatever core anxieties we try to burry deep down.
This atmospheric, unknowable dread is precipitated heavily through the audio design of a lyrically minimal album. What they do have to say, however, is often even more debilitating than the static anonymity of Double Negative. “What can you say, taken aback, all that you gave, wasn’t enough”, Sparhawk mourns in Dancing and Blood, surrounded by industrial wails, exhausted by their own existence and unnaturally elastic resonance from each chord change. It’s an early track in the album and it’s passage hammers home the extent of our own failures despite our noble motivations. As if to document the process of the world loosing its way, Sparhawk recounts in Poor Sucker, “Saw a poor sucker at the bottom of the lake, took the wrong way down as the ground began to break”. It’s a doubly effective line as not knowing which way is up or down highlights the nature of the epistemological crisis we are facing, among other modern day horrors. Parker and Sparhawk’s writing is often as poetic as it is blunt, stark and unavoidable realties as opposed to the malleable and noncommittal aphorisms we hide behind. In Fly, Parker references life as a disenfranchised sex worker, resigned to a cycle of abuse and dependency; all she can do is look to when it’s all over, “Leave my weary bones and fly”. If such absolutism seems like too much, even that’s a sweet bit of relief compared to the most devastatingly central (at least at first) line of the album when Sparhawk warns, “It’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope”.
Low has been referred to as slow core- a term that they allegedly refute. One could infer elements of drone core, ambient electronica, and Goth null metal. Wherever one arbitrarily lands, the at times comatose tempo ensures that Double Negative never comes off as aggressive. Like us, it is too battered down and exhausted to be so. The album as a whole projects a presence of weariness, being too anaemic to writhe in anger or fury. One sympathises. In it we see our own fears of impending defeat gestate. The lethargic pace also ensures the other sonic elements of Double negative are lingered upon and contemplated. We as the listener cannot breeze through this, we are enveloped in its ossified edges, subsumed by the slowly radiating dread that permeates from the wounds of its own making. Dancing and Blood’s extended epilogue leaves you no recourse other than to consider what just happened. Tempest, for all its fiery mutilation proceeds with the most timid of tip toe pacing. Even in the more percussively heavy tracks like Always Trying To Work It Out and Rome the drums are there less to move things along than to block you in.
If this all sounds uninvitingly threatening, don’t worry- nothing could be farther from the truth. The world may have gotten so bad that we lack the ability to process it, but this album does; that’s why it is oddly comforting. That’s why it wants you to linger within it. It’s not here to be galvanizing or emboldening- not at first. It’s not about saying we are mad as hell and we’re not going take it anymore- no one cares. It’s not about screaming from the rooftops and fighting back. We did that; it didn’t work. It’s about acknowledging the abstract notion of despair as a real thing and finding comfort in a like-minded emotional construct. As that motivation becomes apparent, entangling one’s self within the knotted thicket of Double Negative becomes a cathartic experience. Indeed, deep within the caustic web of noise and sound are truly beautiful moments. There are obvious standouts, like the emotional core of the album, buried within the black hole at the center of Always Up. As all of the disfigured sounds briefly wash away, all we have left is Parker in a state of pure optimism. “I believe, I believe, I believe. Can’t you see, can’t you see, can’t you see?” While Tempest is the most viscerally severe experience in Double Negative, it’s the most bravely sweet as well, in a time where such sentiments are deemed luxuries we are increasingly no longer able to afford. As the distortion reaches peak infestation, hijacking even Sparhawk’s vocal chords, it’s almost hard to make out what he is saying, in part because he has willingly given himself over to the noise. Listen carefully and he warmly offers, “Forgive, forget, live, let”. The world may have taken all of our positive energy and tried to render it unrecognizable, but it hasn’t quite. That’s the thesis of Double Negative, the meaning of its name. You can condense all of the negative horrors of the world into one cesspool, but we can still find away to see the hope in it all, buried inside.
Lest one assume that Double Negative is merely a therapeutic experience meant to sooth our short-circuited nerves- in its own preserve way- the album closes with one final call to action. The majority of its run time may allow you to sit back and find comfort in something that actually gets it, but as it concludes, it demands you get up and do something with this new found energy. What that is you’ll have to decide for yourself. Disarray, the final track, achieves this by being noticeably different right from the start. Sure, the at that point pacifying static may seem natural, but the song is composed for the first time primarily of major notes. No longer content with being down trodden, the melody continuously looks upward as do the lyrical drones of Parker and Sparhawk, concluding each phrase on an upward swing. The climatic chants that fill the voids toward the end are unexpectedly revitalising. They have given you comfort, now they need you to get to work. “Before the world falls into disarray, you’ll have to learn to live a different way”. As we all struggle to figure out, just how we are going to get through all of this, you won’t find a more motivating verse or song, one specifically engineered for this moment in history, even if predates it by two years.
In these last two years, there has been a growing incumbency for art of all forms to exist as a statement. To be political. The utility in this is paramount, but Double Negative looks far beyond the standard connotations of such a responsibility. It’s not political in the sense that it is partisan, or left wing or right wing. It is in the sense that it understands how little any of that matters. All of our politicking, all of our desperate protests, all of our beautiful speeches, all of our ardent stands for the moral right. All of it just decays upon release. Double Negative is made of the raw materials that come from that decay, from everything we ourselves put out there. No matter how ugly that image may be reflected back at us, the core message of the hopes and dreams that we put out into the world remain. That we can change, not because we must, but because we can.