"Solemnly beautiful music" Rollingstone Magazine

From its hand silkscreened cover art to its meticulously crafted songs, The Low Anthem offers work meant to be held, savored, contemplated, and occasionally stomped along to. The Providence, RI, trio's debut offers a distinctly human touch in an era of instant uploading and ephemeral expression. The mood of Oh My God, Charlie Darwin is melancholic from the start—quiet, intimate, full of longing, and often hauntingly beautiful.

The Low Anthem combines folk and blues arrangements with the elegance of chamber music and the fervor of gospel. Much of Oh My God is hushed and hymn-like. On stage and in its recordings, the trio uses a variety of unusual instrumentation—by its own count, the band mates took turns playing 27 different instruments on Oh My God—that gives its songs, at times, an otherworldly quality. For example, Miller and Prystowsky refurbished a World War I pump organ that had been dragged by chaplains into the battlefield and is now part of The Low Anthem's arsenal of instruments. Adams plays the crotales, a rack of bronze, cymbal-like discs often used with mallets as a percussion instrument. Adams, however, wields a bow to elicit feedback-like sounds. Some critics have called The Low Anthem's sound Americana, but what the group has really done is to conjure a varied and elusive sound of its own.

To record Oh My God, The Low Anthem retreated from urban civilization into a space of its own. As it says in the album credits, the trio cut these tracks “in the solace of a Block Island winter.” On New Years Day 2008, the trio, several like-minded musician friends, and producer-engineer Jesse Lauter packed their equipment and set out on a ferry for a shuttered Block Island home, 12 miles off the coast of Rhode Island. Says Miller, “It felt very fitting to do this record on an abandoned island. It's smaller than Manhattan, and in the winter there are probably 800 year-round residents. It's all grays and browns then, not much color. It's very beautiful. A good place to get in the right spirit for making these songs. It was the first time we ever worked with a producer, so it was a great load off our backs not to be engineering and over-thinking every detail.”

When Oh My God was finished, an early feature by a Boston Globe reporter helped to ratchet up the buzz; Paste and Rolling Stone featured the group in print and on their websites; in the U.K., Mojo weighed in and BBC deejay Steve LaMacq tipped The Low Anthem as the band to watch for 2009. The gradually accumulating media attention ultimately prompted invitations to perform at a number of summer festival dates, including slots at Bonnaroo, Glastonbury, Lollapalooza, Newport, Austin City Limits, Ottawa, and Philly Folk.

Charlie Darwin
Performed by Low Anthem
Written by Benjamin Miller, Jeffrey Prystowsky and Jocelyn, Adams
Published by Chrysalis Music/Art Boat Publishing (ASCAP)

To Ohio
Performed by Low Anthem
Written by Benjamin Miller, Jeffrey Prystowsky and Jocelyn Adams
Published by Chrysalis Music/Art Boat Publishing (ASCAP)