I have written (repeatedly, excessively, exhaustingly) on the unique LDS strains implicit within the minimalism of Low’s music. It is important for me to remember, then, that Low was a relative late-comer to “slow-core”, a genre tag that pretty much every single band grouped under its banner came to resist and reject (including Low), but which was nevertheless useful for identifying a very peculiar sub-movement that arose in early-’90s alt-Rock.

We have previously noted, for example, Galaxie 500–as well as their successor states Luna and Damon & Naomi–which are often cited as immediate influences upon slow-core (albeit they themselves usually get more classified as Shoegaze or Dream Pop); Bedhead and Red House Painter were another two bands that early Low was often compared to, and who had already been recording for two years when I Could Live in Hope dropped in 1994 (Bedhead would also break up only four years after, and Red House Painter only three years after that—though the fact that Low was the only one of these “slow-core” bands to survive the ‘90s is definitely a point I want to touch upon soon). For my purposes however, the clearest antecedent to Low was Codeine, a short-lived New York-based band that released their cult-classic debut Frigid Stars in 1990; and who had just recorded their third—and final—album the same year that Low released their first.

The similarities are of course obvious: both bands were indie-Rock power-trios of guitar/bass/drums who played depressive music at a slow and deliberate tempo; both featured frontmen who struggled with mental health and addiction; both signed to indie-stalwarts SubPop records at one point or another. Even if both groups resented the “slow-core” label, they were still similar enough to get easily grouped together.

(Indeed, both appeared on the same Joy Division tribute album in the ’90s; Codeine even revived their “Atmosphere” cover as a tribute to Mimi Parker after her passing; I also can’t help but wonder if the “Sea” and “Words” from Low’s first album are oblique allusions to the “Sea” and “Wird” from Codeine’s last. In any case, these bands were obviously aware of and respected each other.)

Yet their differences are perhaps more instructive. Low, for example, played both slowly and quietly (living up to their name literally), and didn’t start experimenting with distortion pedals till the 2000s; Codeine’s John Engle by contrast hit those effects-heavy power chords right from the get-go—they usually just played slower than their Punk rock peers, not quieter—their music was sometimes described as the sound of glaciers colliding. Codeine also featured a full-size drum kit, banged with purpose and precision by Chris Brokaw, as opposed to the austere snare-and-cymbal brushed gently by Mimi Parker.

Mimi of course was the biggest and most crucial difference of all: there was no angelic female voice in Codeine, no divine feminine to counter-balance all that chaotic masculine energy, no reconciling and redemptive harmonies in their music–only the lonely, bedraggled voice of bassist/frontman Stephen Immerwahr. If ever Low could justify its existence when Codeine and Bedhead already existed, it was due to the piercing vocals of Mimi Parker.

Alan Sparhawk once said in interview that the first time Mimi harmonized with him on a song he’d written, it was like the song had shifted from 2-D to 3-D. It was how he knew he needed to start a band with her. That extra dimension not only explains how Low was able to distinguish itself from Codeine, but also outlast every other one of their “slow-core” peers by multiple decades, such that these late-comers to “slow-core” became the genre standard-bearers by dint of sheer longevity.

But what exactly does that extra dimension entail? On just a basic, pragmatic level, Mimi Parker was clearly a calming and stabilizing influence upon Alan. When Sparhawk suffered a bad-enough psychotic break in 2005 to require hospitalization and cause their long-suffering bassist Zak Sally to quit for good, it was ultimately still just a brief blip in the long history of the band (which only ended with Parker’s own passing in 2022). By contrast, when Immerwahr began manifesting symptoms of psychoses during the recording of The White Birch in ’94 (wherein he claimed to hear high-pitched ringings on the tape that even the producer and audio-engineers couldn’t hear), he abruptly broke up the band and walked away from all music performance entirely for nearly two decades. He finally reformed Codeine to play a few reunion shows in 2012–and then had only had their second reunion tour this same calendar year of 2023.

I am of course only a distant observer of both bands’ situations; but I have had close-loved ones hospitalized for psychoses before, and so know how important it is to have someone to ground you back into reality while you receive professional medical treatment. To me at least, it sure sounds like Immerwahr didn’t have someone like Parker to calm him down and talk him back from the edge, so to speak. (Indeed, when Immerwahr said in a recent interview that he wished he’d been easier on himself and less of a perfectionist way back in 1994, that implies there was no one there to help him do so in the first place.)

But Mimi didn’t just provide that extra dimension to Low on a therapeutic level but also an artistic one: it is not controversial to say that Alan always produced his best music with his wife Mimi, not away from her. Though all his other side-projects have had their virtues and charms (he is constitutionally incapable of making a bad album), even his best solo efforts never quite reached the same transcendent heights that even Low’s weakest albums effortlessly achieved. There’s a reason why Sparhawk promptly (and wisely) dissolved Low as soon as Mimi passed: she was clearly the linchpin of the whole shebang.

Because what she provided was resolution to the tension. The reason, I suspect, why all those other “slow-core” bands lasted so few years back in the ’90s is because the unending tension endemic to the genre quickly becomes unbearable and impossible to maintain. The members of Codeine have said in interview that their goal was not catharsis, not climax, but anti-climax–which is admirable in its audacity, and one can’t argue with their results musically; the problem however is that if the tension never breaks, then it inevitably breaks you instead, which is exactly what happened to Codeine after only a few short years. Indeed, every “slow-core” band only lasted a few short years–which, given the sheer number of other legacy indie-bands still out there touring, can’t just be chalked up to the low album sales that a genre like “slow-core” necessarily engenders.

The key distinction with Low, I suspect, is not only did the two core members have a mutual support network with their marriage, but that they really did resolve their tensions! Or perhaps more precisely, their minimalism wasn’t the tension at all, but the resolution itself. As I’ve argued way too many times before, Low did not just embrace the silences between notes, but used them to create a space for the groanings beyond utterance, the peace of God which surpasseth understanding, the still small voice that oft times makes my bones to quake within me.

But for other slow-core bands like Codeine, the empty spaces between notes do not contain the peace of God or the groanings beyond utterance at all, but really do contain nothing. Nothing within the silences can resolve the unbearable tension, because there is by definition nothing there to resolve. It is perhaps an act of courage to stare into such an abyss; but the danger comes not when (as Nietzsche pithily stated) the abyss stares back into you, but rather when it doesn’t stare back at all. Your mind will begin to invent high-pitched sounds to hear (as Immerwahr’s did) rather than intolerably hear nothing in the cold emptiness.

One could of course argue that Alan and Mimi, in their religious faith, were hearing things in the silence that weren’t there, either, I suppose, and that religion itself can be a sort of psychoses. But the difference I think, is that whatever it is they heard, it was something that resolved their depression, not exacerbated it; that reconciled the tension, not worsened it. Whether what Alan and Mimi heard was real or not, everyone must answer for one’s self; but they clearly heard something, which if you have heard it too, it is important not to deny it. (To quoth Alma, “if you have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can you feel so now…”)

Final note: I made passing reference earlier to Mimi Parker as divine feminine. Now that I’ve had a moment to chew on it, I’ve started to take the idea more seriously. Because when Joseph Smith scandalized the mainstream-Christian world by positing a literally embodied God with a physical body, he also put forth the radical doctrine of a Heavenly Mother to accompany Him. Yet save for a single verse in Eliza R. Snow’s “O My Father,” the Heavenly Mother has remained an utterly undeveloped doctrine within our Church ever since. The way the Q15 keeps insisting that we not talk about Her or pray to Her, I wonder sometimes if they wish Joseph Smith had never broached the idea in the first place.

But he did, and She’s with us; and just because we don’t talk about Her doesn’t mean the She doesn’t touch and impact each of us, even in (maybe especially in) the silences. Like Mimi Parker, the divine feminine fleshes us out, reveals a fresh dimension, grounds us and exalts us, adds a new dimension and makes our 2-D world into a 3-D one. This divine feminine is what resolves the tensions and makes the silences beautiful and meaningful; Mimi and Alan of Low understood this intuitively; and Codeine, as excellent and influential as they may have been, reminds us in turn of what the silences look like when they are bereft of Spirit and the divine feminine entirely.