Send "The Low Anthem " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Rollingstone |
 These Brown-educated folkies with a love for old-time Americana fill their second album with harmonium, banjo and more references to Ohio, Montana and the Mayflower than a seventh-grade U.S. history class. Oh My God drags during the sparser songs, and the too-cute "Charlie Darwin" suffers from lyrics like "The lords of war just profit from decay." But pretty ones like "Cage the Songbird" are comfort-food folk, and uptempo tracks like the raucous, Pogues-y singalong "The Horizon Is a Beltway" are even better....full text |
| Thelineofbestfit |
| The one line that will turn up in all of The Low Anthem’s UK press is that Steve Lamacq labelled them “this year’s Fleet Foxes”. Even if they seem unlikely candidates to make the same kind of high street impact, the track you’ll most likely know them for so far, ‘Charlie Darwin’, which opens proceedings on this third album (but first to make a wider impact) refers back to somewhere in between Pecknold and co and Bon Iver. It’s back porch acoustic Americana, laced with harmonies and Crosby Stills & Nash spirit, so spare you can almost feel the air in the room. Ben Knox Miller sings in a high, keeningly tender register about the ills of the modern man and his failing corporations (“Fighting for a system built to fail/Spooning water from their broken vessels, as far as I can see there is no land”) and a dusty harmonica solo at the end. It feels timeless, like it could equally have been handed down from an Alan Lomax field recording or featured as this month’s Mojo magazine rave. A trio from Rhode Island now signed to Nonesuch in America and Bella Union, after an earlier release through End Of The Road Records, in the UK. Slippery customer, expectation. You’re probably wondering whether we really need another plaintive voiced, harmonically strong, intimately produced North American band after the year we’ve just had. But while Justin Vernon sounded like he was making music out of catharsis and many of the genre within a genre’s fellow travellers are as much West Coast as backwoodsmen, The Low Anthem’s strength is that at their most musically downbeat, down at heel even, superior there’s a clear warmth, whether the lyrical content be world fearing, painfully personal or just spiritual at heart. The arrangements seem direct from Woody Guthrie’s dustbowl imagery, pared down and antiquated. It’d be far too easy to compare and contrast these songs of emotional pull and bleak aura with other old time for new audiences artists, but there’s as much Nickel Creek as Delta blues or Will Oldham in many of these songs. The yearning for lost love and for a change of scenery in ‘To Ohio’ sounds equally like the Felice Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel. ‘Ticket Taker’ is a closed miked song of possibly unrequited love against the fall of the world, reusing the waters rising metaphor from ‘Charlie Darwin’ as a backdrop for hoping the lyrical character Mary Anne might join him despite everything. ‘(Don’t) Tremble’ is a more direct love song wherein Miller comes across as a backwoods Guy Garvey, both in his careworn vocal and his finding new and interesting ways to reflect the deep devotion of love – “If your tree should bare no fruit/Do not turn and do not spill… If your hand should lose its grip/Do not tremble do not sweat, for where then would you get”. And then there’s the ‘other’ Low Anthem. The one that turns in a whisky sodden stomp on ‘The Horizon Is A Beltway’ and ‘Home I’ll Never Be’, wherein Miller turns his larynx growlingly red raw and the band turn in a blues stomp that approaches modern bluegrass and Tom Waits somewhere between his barfly and junkyard incarnations. (In fact the latter is a cover of a song most famously recorded by Waits, written by Jack Kerouac.)...full text |
| Uncut |
| Ben Knox Miller and Jeff Prystowsky started making music together in 2003, when they were students at Rhode Island’s Brown College, and recorded their first album, which these days they are too embarrassed to mention by name, in 2006. The following year, still effectively a duo, they released What The Crow Brings, a showcase for Miller’s wordy and sometimes wonderful songs, touching examples for the most part of a bereft Americana – song titles like “The Ballad Of The Broken Bones”, “Bless Your Tombstone Heart” and “A Weary Horse Can Hide The Pain” are perhaps indicative of the album’s solemn drift. What The Crow Brings was shaped by their immersion in America’s folk traditions, with occasional echoes of hillbilly gospel, rousing Appalachian devotionals like “Keep On The Sunny Side”, which is something you could imagine The Carter Family gathering on someone’s porch to sing, a homely crowd gathered around them, long-suffering and noble, giving voice to their own enduring presence in a climate of woe....full text |
The Low Anthem lyrics
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