Low Fails to Match Peak on Latest

“Bring me only beautiful useless things. / Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet…” requests a wounded soldier in Carl Sandburg’s poem “Murmurings in a Field Hospital.” I read these lines a long time ago, but they jumped to the front of my mind as I listened to Low’s “The Invisible Way” for the first time.

There’s something beautiful and useless about “The Invisible Way.” It certainly has the highest production value of any album Low has put out in their 20-year career, but for the most part it simply retreads the same musical concepts as those other albums. Only when Low strays from its hypnotizing, down-tempo formula into stylistically ambitious territory does “The Invisible Way” become interesting.

Low, a trio built around the married co-lead vocalists Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk, has maintained a fairly consistent style since its formation in 1993. Now, more than 12 years after the release of their critical breakthrough “Things We Lost in the Fire,” Low are still checking all of the same boxes that drove “Fire” to success. Harmonized vocals held at length over slow, soft percussion? Check. Innocuous, atmospheric guitar picking? Check. Symbolic, haunting lyrics that evade immediate interpretation? Check. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a band sticking to a certain style, but as demonstrated by the few atypical tracks on “The Invisible Way,” Low could certainly expand their range while still retaining their unique identity. Album highlight “Just Make It Stop” does so with a driving rhythm section and forceful, purposed vocals delivered by Parker. The charming “Holy Ghost” eliminates the rhythm section, allowing Parker’s voice to weave around a folksy guitar backing.

The problem is, for every “Just Make It Stop” and “Holy Ghost,” there are multiple songs that are—and there’s really no other way to put this—boring, though lovely.  “Waiting” and “Mother,” among others, take initially interesting melodies and beat them into submission with agonizing repetition. Musical reiteration is a key element of Low’s minimalist style, but the band usually makes it work by building the recurring structures into something purposeful—the lead-up to a heart-wrenching climax, a tool for hammering in certain lyrical images, or both. Low seem to lose much of their drive on “The Invisible Way.” Many songs just drift away, and it’s frustratingly unclear why the band didn’t try to do more with them.

The most compelling reason to listen to “The Invisible Way” all the way through is how aesthetically outstanding its production sounds. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who produced the album, provides Low’s sound with a newfound clarity. In the past, Parker’s drums have tended to dominate the band’s sonic space at the expense of vocals and guitar. Tweedy’s decision to fade the drums way down gives the guitar and piano more room to reverberate and prop up the extended vocal lines. Furthermore, the way certain instruments are isolated through right-to-left panning puts an end to the muddled sound that has plagued most of Low’s past albums.These techniques are especially evident on “Amethyst,” in which a barely noticeable snare drum whispers out of the right speaker in syncopation with deep, resonating piano chords echoing from the left. Tweedy’s production simultaneously gives “The Invisible Way” vibrancy and intimacy, which is a difficult balancing act.

Because Low’s songs move so slowly, their lyrics tend to linger in the listener’s mind. In the past this has been a good thing, but the lyrical quality feels significantly more scattershot on “The Invisible Way.” Nothing on “The Invisible Way” comes remotely close to reaching the emotional potency of “In Metal,” an ode to Parker and Sparhawk’s newborn child on “Things We Lost in the Fire.” “The Invisible Way” features a few great lines, especially in “Holy Ghost”: “Feeds my passion for transcendence / Turns my water into wine / Makes me wish I was empty.” However, the album also features a lot of throwaway, juvenile writing: “And into the air / We take a chance / Can no longer bear / To miss the dance,” sings Parker on “So Blue.” Unfortunately, the second case is much more common than the first on “The Invisible Way,” which makes the repetitive musical structures that much more grating.

Is “The Invisible Way” beautiful? Definitely. Is it useless? It’s tough to tell. The album doesn’t contribute much depth to Low’s musical oeuvre. It’s also tough to think of many settings in which “The Invisible Way” would be appropriate—while the music is not compelling enough for a focused listen, putting Low on in the background is kind of like switching on a black hole, sucking the energy out of whatever you’re doing. There are parts of the album, most notably the production, that shine, but the rest of it simply feels—as the title suggests—invisible.