There’s a sense in which even trying to review this album is an exercise in futility. Drums and Guns is a Low record. Do you really need me to write anything else?
You probably don’t, actually. Drums and Guns is constructed from the same sonic palette as the rest of the band’s output, full of endlessly feedbacking guitars, tinkling pianos with the sustain pedal all the way down, droning organs with blown-speaker buzz, several metric tons of industrial-strength echo, and the trademark twin vocals of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. It perhaps has a few more electronic-sounding noises in the percussion than many of Low’s previous releases, but not enough to really throw you off.
Essentially, Low created a very specific sound, perfected it on either The Curtain Hits the Cast or Things We Lost in the Fire, depending on your point of view, and demonstrated on their subsequent releases that they’re not really interested in working outside of that template. Which is fine — speaking purely for myself, I’m not interested in hearing Low try to add Detroit House or mallpunk or Nigerian drumming into their mix. They do what they do, and they do it well, and maybe that’s enough. Nobody else really can — the sarcastic lyric of “I’ve heard your records, and they sound a lot like mine” on the throwaway-sounding “Hatchet” only serves to underscore the point.
And on that note…well, Drums and Guns skews toward the less- rather than more-catatonic sounding part of Low’s sound — a few of the songs, such as “Breaker,” and the aforementioned “Hatchet” have what in more plebian hands would probably be called a “nice beat.” It doesn’t have any of the epic-length songs that filled up “Trust”; nothing on the album even reaches the four and a half-minute mark. Despite the fact that the opening cut is the affected death-blues of “Pretty People” (”And all the little babies / they’re all gonna die…”), it’s often a contemplative album, but rarely an overly dark one. The vocals are pretty loud in the mix, actually. That’s about all of the distinguishing marks or scars, right there.
Low are consummate professionals, and though it perhaps loses a couple points for its insularity, the execution of this album is near-perfect. That said, it’s almost impossible to picture Drums and Guns being the album to sway someone on the fence about the band. Although actually, come to think about it, it’s difficult to picture someone on the fence about Low to begin with.
Release date: March 20, 2007
Label: Sub Pop
Rating: 8/10
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