“Charlie Darwin”
from the album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin
2009
iTunes
The Low Anthem ponders eternity in God-haunted, bipolar Americana: hymns and stomps. It’s a three-member band from Providence, R.I., that plays nearly a dozen instruments, among them banjo, E flat horn, and clarinet, creating an atmosphere that’s old-timey but not vintage. The lyrics are too splintered and abstract for that.
Most of the songs on the band’s second album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, are hushed and folky. They’re picked on acoustic guitars and supported by the reeds of harmonica and pump organ, as Ben Knox Miller intones thoughts of apocalypse and redemption, with harmonies from Jeffrey Prystowsky and Jocie Adams.
“They say the sky’s the limit / But the sky’s about to fall,” Mr. Miller near-whispers in “Ticket Taker.” Later he concludes, “I will be your ark / We will float above the storm.”
Every so often the Low Anthem gets rowdy, with a blunt, bluesy drumbeat and raspy shouted vocals. Those songs still muse over metaphysical enigmas: “I promise you this promise we are not alone / But why is it I alone that promise this,” Mr. Miller growls in “Champion Angel,” over the rare twang (on this album) of an electric guitar. The Low Anthem’s upbeat songs sound close, far too close, to Tom Waits; perhaps by way of acknowledgment the album includes “Home I’ll Never Be,” Mr. Waits’s song with Jack Kerouac lyrics.
The Low Anthem still needs to devise its own uptempo approach. But the quieter the music gets, in an elegy like “To Ohio” or a conditional reassurance like “(Don’t) Tremble,” the more its music inhabits its own otherworldly place, where ghosts and angels hover just out of view.