Low Skies

True to the album title, the songs on the latest from Chicago’s Low Skies all address love, but don’t play it to set the mood for a romantic evening. All the Love I Could Find chronicles the bleakest consequences of love, confronting painful loneliness and juvenile obsession at a snail’s pace so that you have to listen to every uncomfortable word. Slow isn’t the word for it; some songs are almost stationary, sometimes building indiscernibly into slow-motion explosions and other times just burning out. Reverberating guitars echo from a mile away, and it feels like hours between each thwack of a brush against a snare drum. The occasional banjo or fiddle adds an alt-country feel, except it’s played at narcotic half-speed.

For singer Chris Salveter, love is felt sometimes in sad intimacy, like when he admits his failures and inabilities in “To Fail You” and “By Your Full Name.” At other times, it’s evidenced only by its absence or in sharp relief to crude, cruel, mindless lust. “Torture” details the pain of missing a former lover and stretches it out to nearly eight minutes to ultimately declare “It ain’t right or wrong to exist in this world alone/But it’s torture.” And it’s even worse when it’s impossible, maybe not illegal but certainly frowned upon, to be with that lover, as in the squirm-inducing “Cousin,” in which he describes furtive moments stolen with a relative at age 14: “I’d wake up at night to watch you pissing.” Creepy, but it’s comforting to know there are sad sacks whose love lives are even more screwed up than yours.