Low Skies - All The Love I Could Find

Genre rock Publisher Flameshovel External Links Official Website Flameshovel

This is not background music. This album is a journey; a very specific place that you never really want to go but every once in a while, as part of the human experience, you end up there. At first listen I was tempted to dismiss it as self-indulgent, shoe-gazer mope-rock - a style I have no sympathy for - but the more I heard, the more the sparse yet full and open arrangements took me somewhere. I didn't end up in a teenager's angst-sodden, laundry-littered bedroom, but in a very adult place of hard choices with the consequences and heartache that often accompany them.

Chris Salveter pulls words into phrase taffy with his mush-mouth delivery and extended vowels, although his plaintive wail gets hard to hear for an entire album. That being said, the vocal track and particularly the chorus of "Sweet Young Girls" is beautifully balanced yearning. Other stand-out bits include the fluid and undulating bass line on "You Can't Help Those People" and the intriguing backing vocal track on the chorus of "The Cause of It" which simultaneously harmonizes and carves its own line. "Cousin" is apparently about being in love with one's cousin which...I don't really know what to say about that except for the couplet "the Christians would burn us alive/if they found out what we did in the kitchen" is one of my favorite on the album. "To Fail You" in its entirety is a stand-out track featuring simple, declarative lyrics and more smoothly soothing walking bass. The album's marathon track, "Torture," clocks in at almost eight minutes long but every second is earned; the instrumentation and swell into the chorus is steadily paced without plodding, pushed by a particularly pulsing lead guitar line. It's the perfect song for anyone enduring a long-distance relationship and sets up the last track, "By Your Full Name," where the futility of longing in pain for some one far away has set in the connection is severed, but not without a long, hard look back.

All the Love I Could Find is a greatest hits of the painful contradictions and decisions of adulthood: knowing your weaknesses, living up to (and letting down) expectations, coming to terms with hurting some one because sometimes, dammit, there's just no way to do what you have to do and not hurt some one. The songs and lyrics take their time to unwind and build with only one song under four minutes long, appropriate considering that introspection and honesty are generally not time-efficient endeavors. At the end of the day unless you indulge your sad heart once in a while, there's no way to appreciate happiness. It's not a place you ever want to go but when you're there, it's good to have company and this album is good company indeed.