05.31.07 5:00 AM CDT
• Music
• Tim Mohr
The LA band Low Vs. Diamond put out an EP in the UK in February called Life After Love. Despite their west coast origins, their music is a melancholic take on the cool New York guitar rock of the past five or so years. Picture the Strokes really bummed out, or the Bravery with far fewer keyboards and effects. Another clue as to the quintet’s sound: the Killers’ manager was so taken with them he signed them. Soon the EP will get its US release. The title track has deceptively fast percussion, which helps keep the moodiness from bogging down the tune. Like the Strokes, the band creates a dense, churning rhythm section while eschewing cheesy guitar pedals that would make it muddy. And singer Lucas Field hits the perfect tone, evoking longing without stooping to maudlin bathos.
The other three tracks are mellower, one (“Stay Awake”) using a mellotron and another (“This Is Your Life”) a heavily reverbed guitar twang to echo the forlorn messages. But this is not self-pitying Emo or the histrionic woe-is-me of the Killers. The sound cranked out by Low vs. Diamond owes as much to classic mid-1960s teenage symphonies (there is, for example, a slightly Kinks-like quality to the title track) as to any of that. And the band’s use of dynamic shifts maintains interest even when the quartet stretches a song out to four minutes.
Somehow, though, Low vs. Diamond sounds like a throwback. With the developments in the indie scene in the last year—the return of krautrock, shoegazing and psych as major influences, for instance, or the continued popularity of DFA-pioneered dance-punk and the proliferation of diverse, experimental variations on it—a band with obvious similarities to the Strokes and Killers (ah, the old days!) seems inescapably nostalgic. Luckily the music is good, so the nostalgia comes across as soothing rather than derivative.
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