The other week week I discovered that the shop I used to live above in Oxford had been turned into a Fopp. Needless to say, I was pretty pleased - central Oxford has been without a music shop since HMV closed down and, whilst I try to do most my record shopping with independent record shops, it is nice to have somewhere to get cheap dvds (especially around family birthdays and Christmas). I still plan to take regular trips to Truck, but it's going to be hard to not spend too much money in Fopp - the convenience is one factor, but the surprisingly good selection of vinyl will be another (metal was a bit slim on the ground but the general rock section had some healthy back-catalogue stuff).
Since it was my first visit, I couldn't help buying a few records and one of the ones I picked up was C'Mon by Low for a very reasonable £10. In a lot of ways, this was the first Low album I really got. I think seeing them live around the time it came out helped - I've seen them live a bunch of times since and their set-list is often new-song heavy. I'll probably never hear as many of these songs played live as I did that first time, which is a shame but I'm very glad it happened.
Anyway, a couple of years ago I was occasionally contributing to a music website and one such contribution was a review of C'Mon by Low. I didn't have the vinyl at the time and since this blog is about my vinyl it was nice to have a chance to write about an album I only had on cd. The rest of this post is then what I had to say about C'Mon a couple of years ago:
I started listening to Low in a fairly round-about way. A couple of years ago I discovered the Daytrotter sessions online and spent hours pouring through the music on there. I listened to the session by Retribution Gospel Choir solely because I liked their name, and from there made the natural jump to Low as they share the same singer. Low's session really blew me away and immediately went into the top 3 of bands I'd discovered through Daytrotter (I wrote a crazed email to my friend Aled telling him how much I thought he'd love Low, only to discover he was already a huge fan). Anyway, I picked up a couple of their albums, but the problem with bands with huge back-catalogues is that the scatter-gun approach to buying them rarely works - I had no idea where to start and maybe didn't hear the best ones first. So, for a while they remained a band I quite enjoyed, up until I saw them play Jeff Mangum's All Tomorrow's Parties festival when I fell in love again. Turns out Low are truly amazing live.
After that I bought C'Mon (safely opting for the £5 CD rather than the nearly £20 LP) and it is far and away my favourite Low album. I may not be an expert on the band, and others may disagree, but if you're thinking about getting into Low, I'd say start here. The ten songs are undeniably Low in their minimalism and atmospheric feel, but for me there's a whole load more going on. Uplifting and painfully dark are there side by side and whilst my personal favourites are the darker songs (like Witches and $20) the others work to balance the mood out. My criticism of the other Low albums I have is that the songs are often brilliant build-ups that stop before they reach where I want them to go, but that's not the case here.
However, the true highlight of the album for me comes on track nine with the epic Nothing But Heart. If I wasn't here writing about the whole album I could probably write an entire piece about this one song. I recommend C'Mon as a whole, but I can't encourage you to listen to this song enough - it's been one of my favourite songs since I first heard it and a year later I still can't get enough of it. The brief intro never fails to remind me of Answering Machine by The Replacements (another incredible song. My old housemate Nicky once said of it that he was always waiting for the drums to appear but loved that they never did). But we just get a fleeting glimpse of this guitar before Alan's vocals take over with four lines of lyrics that carry us for the next 8 minutes; there's a hint of Mimi backing him up as we hear "I'm nothing but heart" over and over again, but it's the instruments that appear from nowhere and float hauntingly to the front of your mind that bring the song to life. The build-up is beautifully slow giving you time to appreciate each subtle change. The finest moment is how the wavering electric guitar somehow changes into Mimi's incredible and almost indistinguishable vocals that have come out of nowhere. The guitars and drums are streaming ahead but they're now sat on this cloud of floating vocals and before you know it the 8 minutes have passed, the song is over and I'm left back in the real world that Nothing But Heart dragged me away from.
The final song, Something's Turning Over, and it's gentle strum mostly serve to give me 3 minutes to re-adjust and get myself together before I have to change the CD. I usually need the whole 3 minutes.
Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 10
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Fopp Oxford
When: 01/08/16
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code
