Fall far enough into their spell that The Curtain Hits the Cast would have made your top-ten list if it were new the year you get to it. Reach this album hoping to learn something about yourself, to measure your degree of connection to the world. And discover, as it unfolds, that asking how connected you are to the world is nonsensical. You don't have to be observant to see so much wonder in the world that no idea could be more painful than leaving it. Just look around you.
Rapture lies in every direction but, at most, one.
In a perfect world, by which here I mean one in which I had so much time and patience that I could have spent a week slowly working through Low's back catalog before listening to Secret Name , and one in which there were never any tragedies I felt obliged to project onto art that entered my life at the same time, I wouldn't have needed these albums by Empress and Mogwai. I probably wouldn't have needed Stina, or Mark, or Lisa. Low would have sufficed. A saner person than me, I think to myself, every time I walk past the stack of 200-CD changers in an electronics store, or into a record store, or into my own study, could live on a lot less music than I do. That can't be sensible.