All the Love I Could Find:Low Skies

Artist: Low Skies

Date Released: February 21, 2006

Label: Flameshovel

Produced By:

Tracklisting:
 * 1) Stone Mountain
 * 2) Sweet Young Girls
 * 3) Levelling
 * 4) You Can't Help Those People
 * 5) It Is True
 * 6) Cause of It
 * 7) To Fail You
 * 8) Cousin
 * 9) Torture
 * 10) By Your Full Name

Review: As far as the progressive Chicago music scene is concerned, there aren't many country-oriented bands floating around (well as long as you don't count that one band that has made a little bit of noise... what was there name? oh yea, Wilco). Its hard to emulate a sound so dependent on the solitude of country living coming from such a vast metropolis; then again, as every Scorcese film has so vividly showed us, the overly-populated city maybe the loneliest possible place to be. Flameshovel's Low Skies know lonely, and they also know how to play country, though not by any means the music that passes these days under that classification. Low Skies' country is deeply rooted in the Chicago blues tradition, and with each quiver of frontman Chris Salveter's voice, another echo of a full-blooded bluesman floats by. The rest of the quintet does an amazing job of creating a very saturated, almost post-rock ambience that leaves no better term for Low Skies, than post-country. Salveter takes center stage for most of the album with his distinctive yelping voice and Henry Miller-esqe tales of love and loss. Teamed with Salveter's lyrics, 'All the Love I Could Find' is almost gothic, as if Guy Blakeslee (of Entrance) was fronting Gravenhurst. No matter how you describe the music, it is enchanting and somewhat comforting in its immaculate distress. Its not country, its not the blues and its not folk, but rather some obtuse niche that carries the emotional weight of all three genres combined but refuses to conform to just one of them. Mpardaiolo