Low
Trust
Kranky

In time for shorter days, colder nights and the trudge toward winter, Low returns with Trust, its sixth studio album and follow-up to last year's stirring and comparatively lush Things We Lost in the Fire. With Trust, the Duluth, Minn., trio doesn't steer far from its trodden path of drawn-out dirges. But that's an advantage. The strength of Low's craft depends upon the concept that the space between the notes is just as important as the notes themselves.

Ringing in with the knell of "(That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace," Trust doesn't begin so much as swell into existence. At over seven minutes of a sinuous guitar line, lazy, inflected vocals and beats that sound more like heavy sighs, this opening track reveals a return to the sparseness of 1996's The Curtain Hits the Cast. With the exception of stadium-rocker "Canada" that weighs in with twice the bombast and churning power of last year's "Dinosaur Act" (and works because it sounds nothing like Low), Trust's tracks find Low gasping and crawling through familiar space.

It's an easy task to hold Low's albums up to each other for comparison when, for the most part, their sounds are caught within a vacuum of the same elements. On Trust, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, bandmates as well as husband and wife, are still singing about death, faith and the likes. The songs are still slow, expansive, heavy with space. But what fills the space isn't nearly as arresting as what filled the spaces behind The Curtain, and Mimi's forcefully fragile vocals, half of Low's overall strength, take a backseat.

With the ominous moan of "Candy Girl," the plodding, mystic chant of "I am the Lamb" and the gloomy discourse of "John Prine," Low brings direness to the foreground, and in the process, draws direct attention to the fact that its strength is not in its lyricism.

Not all of Trust, though, is without grace. "Point of Disgust," the simplest of Trust's 13 cuts, is also the starkest and most striking. Mimi's vocals emerge from back-up, floating above a teetering piano melody. "Shots and Ladders," obviously about illness ("They want to keep you for more tests/ Then stick a needle in your chest"), flutters in like a glowing, winged alien, chiming and soaring with the subtle and eerie beauty that is Low's trademark.

At its best, Low is insidious. The songs creep up behind you, knocking you down so slowly and with such care, the impact lies within the fall itself rather than the landing. Trust, then, is a brick. And while bricks are substantial and solid, valuable qualities for any other band, Low impacts when you can't even feel the blows.

— Lavina Lee (lavina at flakmag dot com)