Low
Winners Never Quit
Nonetheless, the crossroads is busier than ever these days. A growing number of acts with Christian members and messages–among them Sunny Day Real Estate, Damien Jurado, and the Danielson Famile–are gaining larger audiences and learning to cope with the contradictions. On February 9, a bill at Metro pairs two of the most successful such acts, Seattle’s Pedro the Lion and the Minnesota trio Low.
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Pedro the Lion is the brainchild of David Bazan, a pastor’s son reared in the Assemblies of God church–the Pentecostal denomination best known in this cultural moment as the spiritual home of John Ashcroft. Bazan plays guitar, writes articulate and effortlessly melodic pop songs, and sings them, accompanied on each of two full-length albums and three EPs by a changing cast of musicians. Low has undergone just one lineup change in its history, adding bassist Zak Sally six years ago to the core of drummer Mimi Parker and guitarist Alan Sparhawk. Sally isn’t religious, but Sparhawk was raised as a Mormon in rural northern Minnesota, and Parker converted about ten years ago, before the high school sweethearts were married.
“I just want to know why does David cuss in his interview?” wrote xEMO HAIRx. “‘Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same stream?’ James 3:11.”
On the sublime 1999 album, Secret Name, Low finally realized the rich potential of their signature “slow-core” sound, assuredly incorporating the strings, keyboards, and more complex rhythms they’d dallied with before. Sparhawk’s narrative voice blossomed too, and for the first time he didn’t hold back his faithful fervor, deftly weaving scripture into “Lion/Lamb” and crafting a fluid ode to failed Mormon settlers in “Missouri.” But even those tracks and Parker’s delicate spiritual “Weight of Water” (“Take a cupful from your hand / Wait for 40 days / Make a river through the sand / Till you’re called by a secret name”) seem coy compared to the follow-up, Christmas. That EP paired three covers (including an echo-chamber take on “Little Drummer Boy” used by the Gap in a TV spot last December) with five holiday originals as nakedly reverent, deeply felt, and plainly beguiling as Linus’s biblical soliloquy in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
