Duluth trio Low has been tagged as “that slow, quiet band” for most of its 14-year career, but that’s only part of the story. On recent albums like 2005’s The Great Destroyer and the new Drums And Guns, Low has found ways to capture a bigger, denser sound without sacrificing a minimalist ethic. The A.V. Club spoke with singer-guitarist Alan Sparhawk, …
Month: April 2007
Published as part of The A.V. Club’s “Permanent Records” feature, which looked back at classic albums that we’d loved for years. The context: After Robyn Hitchcock’s horrible experience on the bloated, big-budget sessions for his second solo album, Groovy Decay—still the weakest album of his career, and one he says he’s never listened to—the former Soft …
MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and novelist Jonathan Lethem ignores the boundary between literary fiction and “lower” pop-culture or genre work, drawing inspiration from Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and comics. Lethem stayed mostly in science-fiction territory in early novels like Gun, With Occasional Music, and found wider success with 1999’s National Book Critic’s Circle Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn, about …