Low live review
Low visit the Royal Festival Hall tonight free of any promotional shackles – their latest album, the great-in-parts C’mon, is now a year old – and instead the band are giving a one-off performance to show off their arty new visuals, designed and conceived in collaboration with artist Peter Liversidge. Not that the liberation from the standard tour drudge seems to have made much difference to the band – the first half hour draws exclusively and rather listlessly from C’mon, feeling only as sporadically beautiful as the album itself: while the harmonies are as crisp as ever, and the arrangements as crystalline and ravaged, each passing song feels stilted in both performance and passion. The much-vaunted visuals, too, are equally unengaged: grainy vintage footage of biplanes and parachutists, evocative but over-familiar, are projected in slow-motion onto three giant screens, with no apparent connection to the music being performed.
And it seems tonight’s visual accoutrements are as much a distraction to the band as they are to the audience. Low, after all, are famous for their narrowness of scope, and thrive on simplicity; these slowly shimmering skyscapes and, most bizarrely, slow-motion shots of an empty Royal Festival Hall itself, are gratuitous. Thankfully, however, they become easier to ignore as music increases in intensity and charisma – and when ten glitterballs speckle the auditorium in silver stars for the night’s highlight Murderer, one is gratefully reminded of what can make a Low show such a magical experience.
