Review Summary: A crash course in getting into a tunnel, with relish
Low has been the first record I have enjoyed in my life, in full LP format: looking at the cover first, and being puzzled, flipping the cover in search for information, extracting the black plastic Holy Grail, putting A Side on the turntable and letting it go...
I was just 8 years old. It changed everything for my next 30 years to come.
SPEED OF LIFE
- The opener "Speed Of Life" builds up slowly into a "feel good" rythm with some neurotic menace hidden somewhere I don't know (Eno's weird and subdued "sounds")? It sets the tone for the first part of the album: it's no paranoid downer music, there's funk in it, but still is somehow as desperate as can be.
BREAKING GLASS
- "Breaking Glass" is short, full of rythm and awkwards images: the protagonist is apparently standing in a room, quietly destroying and ruining it, but still someone else has "got problems". It ends perfectly too soon.
WHAT IN THE WORLD
- "What in the World" is, to me, the only track that has not fully "classic" status: it's quick, frantic, too openly crying for help. All the album is a cry for help, but more a silently violent murmur for help.
SOUND AND VISION
- "Sound and Vision" comes, poppy and bouncing, still with voice and beautiful melody joining in a lot later than you'd expect, as if the singer was busy doing something else and was called in abruptly from someone to service. Again a room ("blue blue electic blue"), again isolation ("pale blind drawn all day") again a murmur for someone/something to help ("I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision")
ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR
- "Always crashing in the same car" is he poetic peak of the album: it clearly but angularly describes the feeling of uselessness, desperation, the awful feeling that you're making the same mistakes over and over, and somehow the biggest mistake is the need to make the same mistakes over and over. All sung to a pretty funky track.
BE MY WIFE / A NEW CAREER IN A NEW TOWN
- "Be my wife" is graphic and evident. It's like "all above said, I'm drowning: can you rescue me?". Evidently, she can't, and a move is needed ("A New Career in a New Town"). And what a move!
WARSZAWA / ART DECADE / WEEPING WALL / SUBTERRANEANS
Flip to side B and poetry comes in: all I can say about side B is that you can hear the closer thing to poetry ever created by man, without any word involved.
All makes sense, at the end: at first you realize and try to speak out (not scream out) your anguish, then you probably sink into it with relish.
