Music Arcades: Low: I Could Live in Hope

I joined the Galaxie 500 mailing list on 9 June 2000 (I would have joined sooner, if I'd found out about it…). In the very first digest that I received there were a couple of messages about a new Low album. I think that was enough for me: I'd been mourning the loss of Galaxie 500 for a decade, and now here was another band, two guys and a woman, who allegedly made slow, dreamy rock music. When I found that they'd done an album produced by Kramer, well, that was it for me. I was like Jimmy Stewart spying Kim Novak second time around in Vertigo: my head told me it couldn't be the same, but my heart wanted it to be, and I had to hear more. By the time the second mailing list digest arrived, I owned this CD.

For a short while after that I was a Low fan. I saw them, with Tim, at the Melkweg in Amsterdam later that year, and, in a quiet double bill with the Kings of Convenience, at Sheffield Uni early in 2001. And between those two gigs I bought their Christmas album.

Then I stalled. I think opinion on the mailing list was divided about whether 2001's Things We Lost in the Fire was a positive development or not. Sufficiently divided for me to sit tight. Later BBC 6 Music overplayed California from The Great Destroyer. I hate(d) that song: it seemed like they'd ditched their slow, shimmering sound and headed for something more orthodox. Well the slow, shimmering thing might have worn thin with too much repetition, but, please, that's no alternative. Last I heard, I think they were playing Koko, the home of mainstream indie, and the most unpleasant venue I've ever been to in London.