Words

'Words' opens Low's album with a figure trapped in confinement, a man in a box, whilst voices accumulate overhead. The song moves in slow time, built around the interplay between Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker's harmonies, which settle into a hypnotic groove as the chorus repeats its central image: the narrator hearing them, again and again, the words piling up until they become a kind of weather. The lyrical landscape is one of exhaustion and endurance. Pain is described as easy; survival as the harder work. There is a child called back from somewhere, hands that are dry but will make it through one more night. The song doesn't resolve these tensions so much as sit with them, letting the repetition of the chorus do the emotional labour, turning complaint into something closer to acceptance.