Low: The Great Destroyer : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Low -- the long-running, glacial-noir trio from Duluth, Minnesota -- are uncommonly loud, at times even lethal, on The Great Destroyer, their eighth studio album. Co-producer Dave Fridmann, best known for his acid-orchestra ways with Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips, brings a heavy flair to Low's tiptoe-in-snow variations on the Velvet Underground's third album, and the result is impressively visceral darkness: the curdled fuzz organ and rusted-tremolo guitar in "Monkey," the drums rattling under Alan Sparhawk's and Mimi Parker's glass-sheet vocals in "Everybody's Song." Sparhawk's guitar in "On the Edge Of" is so loud and disfigured with distortion you'll check the credits to see if Neil Young has wandered in from Ragged Glory. Eventually, Fridmann and the band reconcile their soft/brutish extremes into a compelling whole: the seven minutes of "Broadway (So Many People)," a dazzling mosaic of drone guitar, convent-choir harmonies and wintry ambience that truly sounds like a new Low.