Voices
So last night via the superbly timewasting chat function appended to Gmail, Mike Powell and I briefly talked about Espers' forthcoming Espers II, which was originally described to me as "Medieval folk + sludge", roughly, and coming off of the amazing Goslings album the word "sludge" carried more currency for me than it normally does, so I grabbed it from Mike and Derek Miller when time allowed.
It's much more folky than even their "Renaissance Faire" mentions would have led me to believe, but luckily it's also fantastic, not so much record as reverie, and with just enough psychedelic mud to keep things interesting. But what surprised me was Mike's contention that the male/female vocals on most of the tracks (particularly "Children Of Stone") reminded him of Low.
Now, I'm more than willing to admit that a large chunk of my reluctance to compare the vocals of Low to pretty much any other band comes from my intense, all-consuming love of their work; but to my ears the singers in Espers don't come even close to blending their voices the way Alan and Mimi do. And that's not because I've been listening to them for so much longer than I've been listening to Espers, because I remember being shocked by the sound when I first discovered Low. I can't express what they do, of course, but listen even to a song like "On The Edge Of", from the underrated The Great Destroyer record, and during the quiet bits... they're not singing harmony, they're not singing unison, they're doing something different. glenn mcdonald could tell you quite a lot about it (scroll down), and more poetically than I'm going to manage before going to work this morning, but the important thing is: When I listen to "Children Of Stone", as good as it is, I hear two people singing. When I listen to Low, I hear something else.
It's much more folky than even their "Renaissance Faire" mentions would have led me to believe, but luckily it's also fantastic, not so much record as reverie, and with just enough psychedelic mud to keep things interesting. But what surprised me was Mike's contention that the male/female vocals on most of the tracks (particularly "Children Of Stone") reminded him of Low.
Now, I'm more than willing to admit that a large chunk of my reluctance to compare the vocals of Low to pretty much any other band comes from my intense, all-consuming love of their work; but to my ears the singers in Espers don't come even close to blending their voices the way Alan and Mimi do. And that's not because I've been listening to them for so much longer than I've been listening to Espers, because I remember being shocked by the sound when I first discovered Low. I can't express what they do, of course, but listen even to a song like "On The Edge Of", from the underrated The Great Destroyer record, and during the quiet bits... they're not singing harmony, they're not singing unison, they're doing something different. glenn mcdonald could tell you quite a lot about it (scroll down), and more poetically than I'm going to manage before going to work this morning, but the important thing is: When I listen to "Children Of Stone", as good as it is, I hear two people singing. When I listen to Low, I hear something else.
