Aftershows Are Musical Desserts: The Low Lows after Spoon [Tonight at Stubb's]

How to describe the Low Lows? Their lo-fi noise-rock aesthetic does not seem a genre that set out to be epic, stately, or disciplined, but this is a band characterized primarily by these three attributes, all the while masquerading as an anachronistic mess.

Now let’s just pause here, because we know what you may be thinking—sounds too heavy not to kill that post-Spoon euphoria. So why are The Low Lows playing a Spoon after show? We’re not going to make any grand arguments yoking the Low Lows to Spoon in any meaningful aesthetic way—these are two bands with vastly different approaches to greatly different goals.

Spoon’s music is all about propulsion, while the Low Lows focus on creating inescapable drag forces behind their melodies. But both bands seem thematically engaged on distilling the complexity of their musical ideas down into almost impossibly simplistic statements. In Spoon’s case, it’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga- pre-symbolic infant babble or shorthand for the chord structure?

And on the other hand, with The Low Lows it’s a penchant for psychic denials so thinly veiled as to call attention to their transparency, which has vocalist Parker Noon crooning heartbreakers like "There is no such thing as Sara Jane." What we’re trying to say here is that moving your musical palate indoors after the Spoon set outside at Stubb’s tonight will likely turn out to be the sonic equivalent of a just the right glass of port after a mouthwatering steak; you won’t know you needed anything more until you’re tasting it.