#6 - I Could Live in Hope

#6
Artist: Low
Album: I Could Live in Hope
Year of Release: 1994
Label: Vernon Yard

A year after this one, Low released their follow-up Long Division.  It's equally great and is basically the cleaner, more polished version of their debut.  The presence of these two superlative albums echoes almost exactly the same internal conflict from my Guided By Voices post, right down to the specific years.

And yet I Could Live in Hope won the battle in my head and it wasn't particularly close.  I mentioned "raw earnestness" as the deciding factor in choosing Bee Thousand, and that reasoning goes double here.  Long Division is devastating in its precision, but this strength also lends itself to distance the work ever so slightly from the emotion behind it.  I Could Live in Hope does not suffer from such a problem.

To this end, the vocals certainly do their part.  Mimi Parker's range is the soul of "Lullaby."  Alan Sparhawk's venom comes through at key moments in "Down."  And their harmonization is a highlight throughout, whether adding a layer of drama to the chorus of the opening track "Words" or a touch of whimsy to their cover of "Sunshine."

But it's the guitar work that really captures this record's emotional edge.  It almost has to be, as early-era Low is defined by their minimalist nature.  Sparhawk does this largely by eschewing the traditional methods of dynamic guitar work.  Instead of switching between musical ideas, the swells in his playing are typically come from drawing more out of the same passages.  And instead of going right from quiet to loud, these transitions are more gradual and subtle.  He's used this skill throughout his career but perhaps nowhere quite as well as here.  What a singular sound from a singular band.