With/Without Available May 19th
Over the course of nine years and four critically acclaimed albums, Bloomington, Indiana's Sam Lowry has slowly been perfecting his unique brand of dark Americana, sharpening the cut of his voice and deepening the impact of his words.
Lowry's autobiographical lyrics have always been fearless in their examination of the complicated relationships of the everyday. The small, noble, and not so noble, reasons we choose to be with others. The commitments of guilt, the despair of solitude, the belief in love, and all the rest.
Lowry's songwriting occupies the dark corner where the poetry of Leonard Cohen shares a drink with Tom Waits midnight observations, while his albums sonically occupy the kind of adventurous gothic American territory traveled by (smog) and Sparklehorse. Helping Lowry complete his vision is a veritable who's who from the fertile Bloomington music scene; including regular appearances from members of Murder by Death and Early Day Miners.
Lowry has spent a good portion of the last several years on the road, with over 600 shows, sharing the stage with bands such as Murder by Death, Langhorne Slim, Asobi Seksu, the Good Life, Early Day Miners, Azure Ray, Mock Orange, Lucero, Codeseven, Vedera, Unwed Sailor, Rocky Votolato, the Appleseed Cast, William Elliott Whitmore, Fake Problems, Frontier Ruckus, the Woes, Blind Pilot, Melissa Ferrick and the Hackensaw Boys, playing everything from basements, coffee houses, dive bars and historic theaters to festivals like MACRock, Bloomingtonfest and Pygmalion.
2009 finds Lowry touring in support of his fifth full-length album, With/Without. Unconventionally recorded live in a single day, in the main hall of a church-cum-recording studio, it finds Lowry leading his band comprised of Sarah Balliet (Murder by Death), Sophia Travis and Nathaniel Seer through revisonary versions of older songs coupled with new ones.
Recorded with only two short rehearsals beforehand, the songs pulse, primordially. They move with the energy of four musicians capturing the shape of a song as it happens, forgoing the gamut of endless practices, multiple tracking and overdubs. This comprises the "with" portion of With/Without.
"Without" finds Lowry alone with his guitar capturing new songs in their most raw form, and radically reworking a handful of old ones into their most primal. With no additional instrumentation, the minimal guitar work places his strongest asset, his lyrics, in the foreground and leaves no doubt that his songwriting places him deservedly in the canon of the greats of his generation..
CREATIVE LOAFING Dark, brooding, tasty
stuff.
CD BABY A creative, dark and deep venture
into the shared musical crevasse of artists like Nick Cave, Tom Waits and
Leonard Cohen. Sparse, empty and despondent, this album slowly oozes its
voice from its pores, dropping pools of dark, liquidy hopelessness into a
deep well of bottomless imagination. With incomplete thoughts and
scattered pieces of wisdom, Sam Lowry weaves a shadowy but stirring album
for those who are in no hurry to understand.
SPLENDID E-ZINE If every singer-songwriter had this much power behind such an
economy of words, we'd probably all have a higher consciousness by now.
Maybe that's what Sam Lowry's nudging us toward, one breathy, retributive
melody at a time.
THE PIN-UP Lowry
works his songs like small garden snakes, getting the lot primed and ready
to strike the hand of another who thinks he can easily charm them. All
notions of rustic, or alt.country or what-have-you seems kind of moot by
now, and even more when Lowry lowers voice to that parched sing-song
vocal.
CITYBEAT With a deflated, Leonard Cohen-like grumble
and an unexpected musical backdrop that blends together traditional
acoustic instruments like banjo, guitar and fiddle with warm yet tricky
drum loops and vintage-sounding keyboards, Lowry has concocted an honest,
dark and surprisingly melodic exercise in aural subtlety that works to
maximum effect. His textural, slanted and poetic take on Roots music gives
new meaning to the phrase "American Gothic."
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