Songs from the heart of the pandemic
Low Praise came together in Oakland, but everyone in the trio—singer and baritone guitar-player Warren Woodward, singer and guitarist Chris Stevens, and drummer Andrew Marcogliese—got to know each other when they were part of the Long Beach indie rock scene. “Warren and I met around 2003,” Stevens said. “We hung out together and eventually started a band called the Valley Arena. Andrew was playing in various bands in Southern California at the time. We didn’t know him very well, but our bands played a couple of shows together. I reconnected with Warren after he moved to Berkeley. Andrew and I ran into each other while working in the same building. Once we got together to jam, things came together pretty quickly.”
Although initially inspired by the hardcore punk sound of the late ’70s, Low Praise developed a more melodic and progressive approach to their songwriting. Stevens said the band’s sound came about by accident. “Warren had been playing baritone guitar in his previous band,” he said. “He enjoyed it more than a regular guitar. A few years ago, I convinced him and another friend to play in an all-drag Sleater Kinney cover band for a Halloween show. Warren was Corin Tucker (Sleater Kinney guitarist and vocalist) on baritone guitar and I was Carrie Brownstein (SK guitarist and vocalist) playing guitar in C# standard tuning. We liked the sound we got from that setup, so our writing for Low Praise took a new approach.”
The band recently released Dressing, their first full-length album, but during production they weren’t sure if it was going to be an album or a collection of singles. The record was recorded in two segments, with a year between the first session and the second. They cut two songs, “Supermind” and “Angela,” just before the lockdown order went into effect. They released them online, then contemplated their next move.
“Songs get built up from core ideas created by Chris and myself,” Woodward said. “Then the three of us arrange them. Andrew is a DJ and an electronic musician. He has a good sense of composition. He’s a great editor and helps get the song into a cohesive structure, finding the right flow for it.
“We hadn’t seen each other for over a year, but we kept writing remotely and built up a backlog of songs,” Woodward said. “Everyone contributed as much or as little as they wanted. The heart of the album was written during the depth of Covid, informed by the BLM protests and the chaos of the Trump years. It was a grim period, but it’s not a sad album. It’s a sampling of what was in our heads and our thoughts about what other people were going through.”
When it came time to cut the new songs, they were still unsure of what they were going to do with the end result. “We know albums matter less and less in today’s market,” Woodward said. “We thought, ‘Let’s just go in and get down what we’ve written and put it out.’ An album is an abstract idea, very old school, but as it progressed we realized we had an album.”
Dressing was cut live, with a few vocal overdubs, at Brothers (Chinese) in Oakland, with engineer Jay Pellicci. It was mixed by producer Jason Cupp, a longtime friend who collaborated with the band on past projects. The songs are marked by realistic lyrics, uplifting melodies and the vocal harmonies supplied by the intertwined voices of Woodward and Stevens. “Time Is Calling” opens with a catchy, distorted guitar hook, and settles down into a driving rhythm, propelled by the groove laid down by Woodward’s baritone guitar and Marcogliese’s drumming. It describes the anxiety and uncertainty generated by the pandemic and the inevitable passing of time, and suggests that the best way to deal with fear is to face it head on.
The band released the album on their own label last month, and are currently looking at ways to promote it. “The biggest challenge as a new band, especially if you’re adults, is the question, ‘Is this really worth it?’ from a time investment standpoint,” Woodward said. “You put an insane amount of effort and personality into building art that is usually consumed by a very tiny number of people. When we were younger, we depended on some sort of outside validation to prove our work had worth. Now that we’re older, we find there’s a lot of joy in doing the band for the sake of the band and the intrinsic satisfaction of the craft.”
He added, “We don’t look at this band as a platform for making money and/or gaining fame. I think we all love the process of being in a band with good friends and doing the work of musicians, occasionally getting to share the stage and meet other musicians we really love and look up to.”
Listen to Dressing on the band’s Bandcamp page: lowpraise.bandcamp.com/album/dressing.
