Low Roar
Low Roar
Tonequake Records.
SCQ Rating: 79%
“I won’t wake a
wealthy man someday, cause the sun don’t follow me,” Ryan Karazija insists in
the opening lyrics to Low Roar’s eponymous debut, and it’s a tough pessimism to
pierce. As a twelve-song ode to the challenges of moving from California to
Iceland and trying to adapt to a startling new life, Low Roar already carries
some metaphorical (and literal – sorry, had to) baggage. But the self-titled record proves a
harder nut to crack in light of how it projects that baggage, choosing a
consistently dreary mood that reduces each song’s tempo to a chilling crawl.
That uphill battle, daunting though it may be, beguilingly sets the stage for the
many reasons you, dear reader, will want to stick around.
Each song plucked
from the self-titled’s first handful of tracks conveys acoustic ruminations
backed by two disparate palettes: a molasses-slow smear of buzzing organ (‘Give
Up’ and ‘Patience’, the latter sounding like a minimal reduction of Coldplay’s
grandiose ‘Politik’) and electronic ambience (‘Nobody Else’). Karazija
establishes his Thom Yorke-styled vocals elegantly into both environments and
somehow merges the wintry isolation of his words with a nestled coziness drawn
out by his arrangements. His songwriting knack neither lightens nor slips over
the course of its near hour, although one could argue that the remote feeling
intentionally driving Karazija’s muse becomes detrimental to the album as a
whole. As much as I appreciate the merits of later songs like ‘Rolling Over’
and the mournful ‘Help Me’, it’s tough to stick by the record uninterruptedly.
That Low Roar’s single, ‘Tonight, Tonight, Tonight’ appears at the close of the
song-cycle might be acknowledgement of the record’s long journey but it’s
telling that I can’t tell you what it really sounds like.
Obviously a work of
extreme intimacy, Low Roar bears a lyrical directness like the diary of a man
abandoned to the edge of humanity. Still, it proves lush and evocative
beyond Karazija’s supposedly stark confines and looks to connect with anyone
susceptible to melancholy. If given the proper time to digest, Low Roar has all
of the makings of an overlooked, if arduous, classic.
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