Es Muy Bueno: Low, The Great Destroyer

Trying to describe music in print is, of course, sort of like trying to grab a fish barehanded; you're never, ever going to be able to explain in words what it is that makes a given album or song transcendent. So let's start by saying that The Great Destroyer is fucking amazing, and you really owe it to yourself not to take my word for it but to instead get a copy and listen.

That out of the way, here's what makes The Great Destroyer so good in my eyes: Like few other albums I've ever encountered, the disc successfully engages pretty much the entire emotional spectrum. Both lyrically and sonically, this album sounds like modern life feels. In parts, it's up-tempo and hectic. Other times it's slow. It's always interesting. Alan Sparhawk has a great sense of how to use his guitar-- sometimes it's huge, sometimes it's sparse, but it's always exactly what a song needs (in my favorite song on the album, "When I Go Deaf," it is both sparse and huge; the song has a minimal sound most of the way through, and then suddenly Sparhawk's guitar explodes).

The lyrics are good (“California” is the best roundabout description of what it feels like to be be frustrated with living in Minnesota I've ever heard). The vocal harmonies are good. The sequencing is good. Everything is good, for god's sake. My only beef with Destroyer is that it doesn't work too well as exercise music; listening to it on a long-distance run just made me feel like I was experiencing relativistic time dilation. But you can't have everything.