The Low Anthem

By Brett Cromwell

For the recent release of their second album, What The Crow Brings, Providence duo The Low Anthem put together 500 hand-silkscreened, serial numbered CDs packaged in recycled cereal boxes. These rare gems for music lovers were a nod to an era when the beautifully rendered artwork and printed lyric sleeves of albums were just as important as the music housed inside. It’s nostalgia for a time even further gone by that best describes The Low Anthem’s fascinating music — soft, simple, and moving pieces that conjure images of quiet campfires and dusty saloons.

According to Ben Miller and Jeff Pystowsky, the two young multi-instrumentalists who make up The Low Anthem, capturing this unique sound in the exact way they wanted, took a healthy amount of time, patience, and vintage instruments. “We’d work for a whole day with six mics in the room just to find the right upright bass sound,” says Miller, also noting that the duo scrapped numerous versions of songs, and sometimes songs entirely, during the eight months they spent home-recording What The Crow Brings in the Providence apartment they shared at the time.

Deeply rooted in dark folk with hints of gospel and country, the sound of The Low Anthem is best described as music undisturbed by and uninterested in the trends and technology of the last half-century. “There are more than 25 instruments on the album that the two of us play,” Miller states matter-of-factly, among them a pump organ, a tube harp, and a toy piano. “A big part of our music is creating textures through different combinations of instruments. You’ll never hear a guitar solo or a trumpet solo. The instruments are all there, but blended together in very minimalist parts.”

Emanating from this deliberate simplicity in sound is a thick, emotional fog — a mood further haunted by natural touches like the brush of a hand against the guitar or the soft gurgling of air through the pump organ. Miller’s voice rides high in the mix, stringing together ambiguous story songs about everyday objects like bones, the moon, crows and not-so-common subjects like a Spanish heartbreaker, a war-ritual at a local saloon, and a man going insane in his home.

To Miller, keeping the story open for listener interpretation is key. “Our songs are abstract stories and circle around ideas that are kind of vague to the listener, and vague to us as well. The subject has to be abstract in order for us to think imaginatively about how to tell the story.”

The one exception to this rule may be “Sawdust Saloon,” a somewhat straightforward story of a young man going off to the Vietnam War, told with acoustic guitar and mandolin accompaniment. The centerpiece of the story — the narrator hanging a chicken bone on the chandelier — is based in truth from an actual bar in New York.

“The story behind those bones,” says Miller, “is that before soldiers went off to World War I, they would raise a drink and hang up these chicken bones. The idea was that when you came back from the war, you’d go out for a drink with your buddies and break the wishbone. The bones that are still there are from those who didn’t come back. I chose to place the main character in Vietnam because it’s a war that’s more recognizable right now with its parallels to what’s happening in Iraq.”

Having captured the feeling they wanted in their home studio, Miller and Pystowky are now constantly challenged with recreating a similar mood onstage, and with much fewer instruments. But according to them, it’s the power of their performances and their sincerity that people most appreciate.

“Our live show is always loose,” explains Miller. “It’s never clean and crisp and nice. We’re not a polished live group at all, which I love, because when it’s polished, you can’t really hear the music anymore. Music lives somewhere in the mistakes that you make, and the fact that your voice is slightly out of tune. If you know what you’re trying to do as a performer, then you can’t do it honestly because you’re too self-aware.”

In their ongoing attempt to bridge the gap between the junkyard ballads of Tom Waits and the edgy folk rock of Neil Young, The Low Anthem will bring their raw, live experience to intimate venues all over the Northeast this winter.

www.thelowanthem.com