Low Roar turns mechanical clicks indistinguishable from drums, and the voice of the oh so regretted Ryan indistinguishable from the warm, uniquely icelandic synths it is so fond of. in fact, this album could not have been made anywhere but in Iceland: it is too vast, cold, yet full of life, phased with nature, because you are also part of nature, everyone is, even when it is this hard to get out of bed. no wonder Death Stranding, one of the most gorgeously alien, viscerally dreamlike video game experience ever chose this album as its de facto soundtrack. Low Roar was always about dreams. Ryan always sounded like the muffled voice of a deep unconscious yearn, a yearn for connection, in its deepest, strongest form.
dreams where the love is strong, too strong, strong only like it can be in a dream. I have them often: we are the only two people in the world. we wander, hand in hand, at night. and it is cold, and we can walk in the ocean, and bathe in the snow, and no house or street or path is as I have ever seen any house, street, or path before. it is all vast, and empty, as we are the only two people in the world: and there is nothing to hide or doubt or fear, and everything to love and cry for, about you, and me, the only two people in the world. I wake up with a deep sense of loss, like I found a bit of my soul and lost it, like the one of my dreams has died and I carry their ghost with me. the ghost looms over my real life relationships: why can't we be the only two people in the world again?
Low Roar tells me we can. we can be alone, together. we can be one soul split in two, hand in hand, all of our thoughts free from each other's judgement. I can be lonely yet more deeply connected to the ones I hold dearest than ever before. Last night, I woke up from a dream like this with the unmistakeable warm buzzing synths of Kazarija playing over and over in my head. it turned out to be Anything You Need, from this album. for a moment, it made me feel like the dream. I did not speak to the person I dreamed about that morning: I did not need to, for we were the only two people in the world, and the love was strong, too strong, strong only like it can be in a dream, and some dreams are dreamt awake. Low Roar does exactly that: it makes me dream, awake. it makes me believe that of course there will be pain, indifference, ignorance, of course there will be times when the very act of talking to them is a chore and times when there is not enough time to forgive everything that has been done, but love transcends that. love is Iceland: vast, empty, cold and green and steep and lonely and vibrant and grey and endless and calm. we are the only two people in the world, and there is nothing to fear and nothing to hide and everything to love.
platonic love, romantic love, alike. no single soulmate either. I have had these dreams about several people and I feel this way about several people, who I love in different ways. but I love them, and they love me. a few pieces of art can express that love for me, can crystallize it into sounds, sights, words even. but nothing, absolutely nothing expresses it like Low Roar's 0. I did not know anything, let alone music, could make me feel this way, I did not know I could recapture that feeling, catch lightning, no, catch love in a bottle.
- OswaldC
