Disappears – Low: Live In Chicago

Philip Glass aside, why on earth would anyone choose to take on Bowie’s Low? There is context: the opening of last year’s Bowie exhibition in Chicago, and the opportunity for acts to reinterpret back catalogue over a series of live events. Low, the challenge accepted by Disappears, certainly doesn’t want for ambition, while the fanboy affinity towards source material is strongly evident.

But still; for a guitar-centric band to take on musical territory of considerable nuance (and considerable Brian Eno) without significant structural deviation feels pedestrian – particularly on the poppier tracks of side A, where Breaking Glass and Sound and Vision suffer from perfunctory posture, the riff-work cute but crying out for something beyond the bierkeller cover-band treatment.

Side B – perhaps Bowie at his most experimental – is more of a success, the guitars and pedals forced to transcribe Eno’s brooding, counter-intuitive synth cadences, Warszawa and Weeping Wall both transfixed and transfixing. Yet even here the aroma of facsimile rides high in the mix, and beyond souvenir, the question of why? remains unanswered. Maybe you had to have been there.