The Low Anthem brings its US winter tour to a close this week before heading to Europe, with shows in Portland, New York, and in the abandoned pasta sauce factory where they recorded their new album, Smart Flesh. The Boston Globe says The Low Anthem hit "a high note" in its Friday show at the Old South Church, "a galvanizing 90-minute performance that was masterful and even magical at times."
The Low Anthem brings its US winter tour to a close with a few more special shows this week before they head to Europe. Following the weekend's sold-out shows at Boston's Old South Church and at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, the band heads north to Portland, Maine, to play at SPACE Gallery tonight, then down to New York City to play Bowery Ballroom tomorrow night. On Saturday, The Low Anthem returns to the abandoned pasta sauce factory where they recorded their latest Nonesuch release, Smart Flesh, for what will undoubtedly be an unforgettable tour closer.
As noted in the Nonesuch Journal on Friday, for these last few shows of the US tour, the band's friend Jay Hallstein of The Press Bed will be on site hand-screen printing one-of-a kind shirts (à la the image at left), designed specially for these shows. Fans can also bring a shirt of their own (or any other garment/printable item) to the merch table for Hallsetin to silkscreen.
Boston Globe says the band hit "a high note" in its concert at the historic Old South Church in Boston. While the venue may have been an unusual place for the crowd to gather on a Friday night, "it’s not a typical Friday night when The Low Anthem are preaching from the pulpit," says the Globe's Jonathan Perry.
The Low Anthem's music is "at once spectral and earthbound, haunted by ghosts and hounded by demons," writes Perry, "or booze ... or passion ... or all of the above."
He describes Friday's concert as "a galvanizing 90-minute performance that was masterful and even magical at times."
While the church, with its "crystalline acoustics," proved a perfect venue, "stunningly suited" to the band's songs, "it was ultimately the musically multitasking Low Anthem members themselves," says Perry, "that brought the songs to beating life."
The quartet's ability to take up any number of instruments from one song to the next may be well known that this point in the band's career, it's "still striking to behold," Perry concludes. "The dynamic went to the temperament of these songs, and the sense of communal spirit that happens when comrades gather to converse and play their anthems, low, high, and lonesome."
Read the complete concert review at boston.com.
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From Boston, the band headed to the other end of Massachusetts to perform at MASS MoCA on Saturday. The band wound up "impressing an audience ready to be impressed," says reviewer Michael Eck for the Albany Times Union. Their music is "infinitely creative within the scope of its earth-tone palette, and the dynamics rise and fall from a whisper to a roar. Neil Young should snap these kids up and a make record with them right now."
Eck goes on to praise band member Ben Knox Miller for his "remarkably malleable voice, and it serves as a unifying theme throughout the band's nimble yet stark music."
In addition to their appeal to Neil Young, Eck finds apt comparisons with a few other famed singer-songwriters. "The lyrical sense borrows heavily from Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and American folk song," he writes, "creating vague sonic pictures with finely etched elements that leap out from the shadows."
Read that review at timesunion.com.
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For more on the band's tour, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour. For a copy of Smart Flesh with high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s of the album included at checkout, head to the Nonesuch Store, where you can also pick up the album with a poster signed by the band.
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