Seek Warmer Climes Lower
The debut album, released 13th June 2014
Lower make intense music. Seek Warmer Climes, the Copenhagen quartet’s debut album, sparkles with the harmonic dissonance and high-strung urgency of their underground rock forebears. But Lower also channel the romance and drama of great singer-songwriters, from late-period Scott Walker to Bryan Ferry. The result is a hugely ambitious and affecting rock album that enters deeply personal and unusual sonic and topical spaces.
Certainly, you don’t have to dig deep to hear how far Lower’s music sits from the traditional concerns of modern rock music. Toubro’s lyrics are finely wrought emotional dramas that, in their poetic construction and raw honesty of delivery, gesture to the music of Walker or Leonard Cohen. As inspirations he cites Cornelis Vreeswijk, the half Dutch, half Swedish troubadour whose coarse language and fascination with low society shocked the conservative listeners of the day, and filmmaker John Cassavetes, who made his movies about “real people with real issues”. Similarly, ‘Lost Weight, Perfect Skin’ and ‘Unkempt And Uncaring’ gaze unflinchingly at a troubled inner life: the problems of vanity and vulnerability, of suffocating lethargy and men who wear their bravado like a mask. “Every song on the record deals in some way with personal development, be it emotional or cosmetic,” says Toubro. “How to act in different social contexts, and to acclimatize oneself into a given situation without losing face.”
What the press have been saying:
“The Danish postpunkers Lower are the rare European band to show almost as much influence from the Dead Kennedys as they do from Joy Division.” Stereogum
“Though many bands have shared Iceage’s passion, there has only been one to date that has managed to share their absolute raw talent, and that band is Lower.” DIY Magazine
“…a thing of vulnerability and red-raw emotion…” NME 8/10
“…it’s an engagingly stylish record, an agreeably abstract work of oblique angles and wintery spaces.” The Line Of Best Fit
Lower are:
Adrian Toubro – vocals
Simon Formann – guitar
Kristian Emdal – bass
Anton Rothstein – drums
Track-listing:
01. Another Life
02. Daft Persuasion
03. Lost Weight, Perfect Skin
04. Unkempt And Uncaring
05. Expanding Horizons (Dar Es Salam)
06. Bastard Tactics
07. Soft Option
08. Craver
09. Tradition
10. Arrows
Seek Warmer Climes is out 13th June via Rough Trade/Matador
