The title isn’t an enormous “Kick Me” sign, honest.
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[6.44]
Sabina Tang: Low always felt like a band that would reward me if I ever paid active attention to their songs; thus far I’ve only managed to skip over what I’m aware is a mere surface of low/mid-tempo, low/mid-range pleasant acoustic melancholy. They’re like an intricate pattern printed navy blue on black. I am paying active attention to this, which pours unbearable tension into tempo and dynamic changes so minor I suspect I’m imagining them. It sounds simultaneously like an implosive panic attack and a slab of mid-everything-going-nowhere. I want to rate it higher for the tour de force, but what if I’m sure twice over I won’t listen to it again?
[6]
Anthony Easton: This seems surprisingly sumptuous for Low, and they seem to have spent their attention on the music, and less of attention on the lyrics. Considering I put Low in the category described by the Silver Jews as “all my favorite singers couldn’t sing”, finding out that not only can they, but they can make a quite conventional aesthetic out of it, might make me reconsider how I feel about them, which seems unfair, but we all have the little hipster demon inside us.
[5]
Jer Fairall: The last time I bought a Low record, it was still the ’90s and they were still making what felt less like pop songs than amber sepulchres of them: frozen, alien, their innards laid bare for close, microscopic study. It was not a style I could ever imagine sustaining any band for nearly two decades, and indeed Low are now making spare but hardly unconventional alt.country records produced by Jeff Tweedy. The lyrics continue to hint at both the cryptic fragmentation of their earlier work and the members’ devout Mormonism, but unlike the old days when the combination of the above might have hinted at something truly unnerving (“On the step you handed me pieces of plan / At the gate you handed me pieces of the plan / Can I hold them for a week?” went the entire lyric of one song), this feels a little too comfortable in its tastefully furnished settings for me to feel much of the tension that Mimi Parker’s still worryingly unsteady vocals can usually manage to bring all on their own.
[6]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Mimi Parker sounds frozen in place with terror, making this song a rigid walk through an apocalypse. Daunting, but also a tad dulling.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: “Just Make It Stop” feels atypical for Low, and if this is your first taste of their new album you might think they’re interested in writing choruses and tunes that, if not poppy, make for a less introspective, introverted listening experience than before. You’d be right, too, but the song’s not just a signpost; Mimi’s voice conveys ache and turmoil, but the song’s still only a heartbeat and an accidental play at the wrong speed on your record player from being a hymn. There’s a tiny core of hope in the middle of the desolation, and “Just Make It Stop” repays the listens while you tease it out. My teenage self would have killed to hear this on a graveyard radio slot, and that’s probably where it belongs — in a good way.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: I’m pretty sure I wasn’t meant to be singing along with the song about the song.
[5]
Brad Shoup: That chorus! A glum garland, set apart from from the tortured rope imagery. Low craft big seas of piano and drum kit, a la “Rock of Gibraltar.” But while “Gibraltar” is, perhaps, cartoonishly adult, “Just Make It Stop” is uneasily adolescent. The refrain pleads for a median.
[6]
Alfred Soto: This band once inspired such devotion that a close friend followed them around the Southeast. Now they go alt-country vocal atop a Yo La Tengo strum bed. Melodically or lyrically there isn’t enough going on in the verses other than, well, a change of pace — a word I don’t associate with Low.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Mormons who are on record as, for example, being pro-marriage equality, Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk of Low have some experience with more nuanced religious/political stances than the pundits normally allow. And they couldn’t have timed this single better if they’d tried. Of course, I’m sure they would happily trade the sudden extra-appropriateness of “Just Make it Stop” for not having had such an extra-noticeably-horrible week last week instead. But as long as we’re here, we can appreciate how well the song articulates a feeling that a lot of people are having right now, an overwhelming desire to ask the world (or God) to just hold off for a minute, so we can get our bearings, deal with our broken hearts, and brace ourselves to deal with the onrushing flood of human vice and virtue again. It’s probably clearer in the context of The Invisible Way than here that the titular plea here is married to a resolve to help make things better, but when she sings “if I could just make it stop breaking my heart” the thrum of her voice and the hammering piano is clear enough; this isn’t a call for withdrawing from the world or even for bad things to stop happening (they’re not that naïve), but one for the resiliency to not be stopped by our broken hearts from helping loved ones and others. The score is for the song regardless of recent events, but I am glad that it’s out there right now in particular.
[10]