Low - Things We Lost In The Fire

By 2001 Low had spent seven years perfecting a kind of music that seemed to actively resist a wider audience: slow, quiet, patient to the point of confrontation. Things We Lost In The Fire broke through anyway. Their fifth album, and the second recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago after Secret Name, it is the one where the songwriting finally caught up to the atmosphere.

"Sunflower" opens with a first verse that has been wrecking listeners for twenty-five years. "Dinosaur Act" is as close to a rock single as Low ever came, and it was released as one. Mark de Gli Antoni fills in piano, keys and samples, Bob Weston adds trumpet, and "In Metal" ends the record in a haze of strings and Mimi Parker's voice, singing about wanting to freeze her infant daughter in time with a tenderness that lands closer to grief. Albini's engineering keeps all of it dry and enormous at once, all room and no gloss.

The reception was close to unanimous on release and nothing has cooled since. It sits high on the major critical lists of the best albums of the 2000s and of the century so far, it was performed live in its entirety in 2006 as part of the Don't Look Back series, and the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez borrowed the title for her story collection. Twenty-five years on, it is still the Low record people hand to newcomers.

This double LP spreads the album across three sides with the fourth etched with lyrics, and adds two vinyl-only tracks, "Overhead" and "Don't Carry It All," both B-sides of the "Dinosaur Act" single and absent from the CD. Gatefold sleeve, mastered by John Golden. Kranky, KRANK046.