Low “Hey What” Album Review

            One of the most visually stunning, unique sounding, dig into your soul and claw you out, chills-all-over-your-body sounding albums I’ve ever experienced, HEY WHAT has put to sound sensations that are otherwordly, ethereal, and death defying. 46 minutes of organised chaos, one youtube comment describes it as being ‘like solace at the end of the world’. The philosophical theme of this album is represented by that of an oceanic voyage, or passage. We sail over seas of all temperaments, encountering questions and contemplations of various urgencies. Devastating, and lonely, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker have curated a place that is both hard to go to and hard to leave. 

            Our opening song is ‘White Horses’, a song about the search for transcendence and surrendering to the universe. It opens with a choppy, stoccato guitar and amp distortion sound collage, Mimi and Alan’s voices eventually joining in over flickering instrumentation and echo. Sounding like the chugging of a rollercoaster dragging itself upwards, or the flickering chaos of a dream beginning. Like the opening of a door to explore a new world, the first taste of a thought, we follow the guitar and amp into this curated philosophical and existential abstraction of an album. It’s only just begun. 

            Blending seamlessly into ‘I Can Wait’, the melody brings us from a foamy, frothing, white water into a smooth, contemplative, open ocean. Speaking in chants as if in denial, or coming to terms with something, ‘I’m awake, I’m awake, I’m awake, I’m awake, how long was I awake?’. They reference the ambient oceanic Odyssey in the lyrics of each song as well, ‘I can’t say anymore, like a ship to the shore… I can give it away, I can leave or stay.’ They leave us with a quiet ultimatum as the song fades into confused distortion, almost like zooming out into the distance, at something very, very far away. 

           In the ocean that is HEY WHAT, ‘All Night’ is the mostly gentle harmless, rolling ocean. The thumping, scratching guitar beat underneath Mimi’s harmonies are the waves lulling us to sleep, tender and delicate in its harshness. Most haunting in its sound, the beginning sounds like a distant droning alarm, a resigned humming, that over the song’s 5 minutes, blends further into distortion and noise, a digital malfunction. 

          The epicenter of the album, the center that cannot hold, the radiating core of this album, is ‘Disappear’. Most straightforward in its nautical reminiscent themes, ‘Somewhere out on the ocean, across the waves that rise and fall… some kind of madness, I don’t know.’ Plunging us unprotected into the great depths of contemplation of the unknown, we’re baptized in the noise and come out the other end in what sounds like the auditory depiction of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Sun II’. Three minutes of despondent pondering about the unknown, ‘an ever-present reminder, a constant face of the unknown’ before the song dips into pristine cleanness again we are shattered by swelling, distorted chords and outright noise. If the void could speak.

           The beginning of “Hey” plants us in a very different landscape. There’s a period that feels like you’ve just arrived somewhere, I can picture an empty beach and flocks of birds up above, and we are alone in a bright middle space, waiting. The end portion of ‘Hey’, similar to ‘All Night’ is haunting in the most literal and visceral way, like hearing the sounds of ghosts way before your time, and the perfect echoes of a place you could never ever go back to, that doesn’t exist anymore. The heavy resonance like the burdening weight of time, the soft harmonies calling out to something lost. This portion of the song is so saturated in what feels like resigned grief, I don’t know how to describe it except devastating. A repetition resigned in the end to something hopeful, like bubbles flowing up to the surface, but the depths don’t go away. Then it leads us to the most influential song, for me, the beating heart, “Days Like These”. 

           If there was a musical equivalent to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, ‘Days Like These’ would be the scene at the beach when he is confronted by death and invites him to play chess. A terrifying, undeniable confrontation that sends him into the eye of an existential hurricane. Beginning simply, the harmonies nearly disappear behind crackling distortions, a sense of urgency and dread in its message. ‘Always looking for that one sure thing, oh you want it so desperately. No, you’re never gonna feel complete, no you’re never gonna be released.’ After grabbing us by the throat and pleadingly shaking us into comprehension, it releases us into the calm again and allows us time to float on in repeating waves of ‘again’, ‘again’. A strikingly stirring melody, we contemplate the state of the world moving from crisis to crisis, but the undertone of internal philosophical turmoil is even more desperate. 

            Follows is what sounds like a dying supercomputer, where even the familiar forms and melodies have been lost to the chaos, in ‘There’s a Comma After Still’. ‘More’ invites for the first time a feeling of acceptance. ‘I saw more than what I ever sought. I should have asked for more than what I got.’ Speaking now in past tense, we realize we are nearing the end of the Odyssey. “The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing Off)” trails from glossy pristine vocals into harsh muddy distortion again, jagged at the edges, led by a thumping drum beat, and then dissolves again into the end of the album. 

           Cathartic and catastrophic, ‘Hey What’ creates a world, blows it all up, and searches for meaning in the rubble. Harrowing, and bone-chilling, there is a tension in this album that never quite gets released. Very beautiful but very intense, ‘Hey What’ is a very lonely album. Somehow blurring the reality between life and death, ego and enlightenment, light and dark, reminding us that you cannot separate these two things, as you can’t separate death from life. ‘Hey What’ as a whole is the encompassing space of the void, but there is something growing in it, like the first hum in the beginning of the world. Devastating, and lonely, but comforting as well in its honesty. Each revisit reminds me that this album moves with terrifying exactitude in its timelessness, like a train that is always coming, unceasing, and also never getting any closer or farther away.