SOMERVILLE -- The minimalist music trio Low, formed 10 years ago by a married Mormon couple and a comic-book artist from Duluth, Minn., opened and closed its set at the Somerville Theatre on Saturday with songs about the end of songs. The night began with singer and guitarist Alan Sparhawk singing ''Death of a Salesman," a tune about a young man who burns his guitar in the name of middle-class mediocrity. A couple of hours later Sparhawk and his bandmates -- drummer Mimi Parker and bassist Zak Sally -- concluded with ''When I Go Deaf," a wanly hopeful chronicle of things that will outlast their ears that began to make a devastating sort of sense when, at minute three, the group hurled itself toward the inevitable with a surprise squall of lethal noise.
Low raises the volume and the intensity level
Low has spent most of the last decade making music that barely rose above a whisper and rarely exceeded the pace, or the warmth, of a glacier. During some of Saturday's sold-out show, the group plumbed the signature austere depths of the slowcore movement it helped pioneer, preparing aural bouquets like ''Shame" -- a sliver of oblivion composed of sounds that amounted to little more than a thump, a bell, and a feather -- and ''(That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace," where Sparhawk's falsetto and Parker's soprano pooled together in a chilled quiver and the electric guitar was less a musical tool than a concealed weapon, briefly unsheathed for sudden kills and then hidden between deceptively tranquil folds.
But on Low's seventh CD, ''The Great Destroyer" -- its first collaboration with Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann and its debut release on the Sub Pop label -- the trio loosens its grip on the carefully conceived experiments of youth. Sparhawk and Parker have two young children, and Sally left Low for a while in 2003, throwing the band's future into crisis. The new album's main theme is aging, and for Low, confronting the passage of time means making the invisible visible, proclaiming what was formerly implied, and facing down the cacophony that was perpetually cloaked in coiledquietude and sinister softness. On ''The Great Destroyer," the curdled, fuzzed-out mess of the middle years rears its unsubtle head.
Viciousness has been building in Low's music for years, and the band sounds (and looks) frankly relieved to finally be playing lush, angry tunes. It doesn't get any harder than ''Everybody's Song," a mercilessly abrasive cut. Parker -- who stood serenely at a stripped-down kit armed with only mallets and brushes -- smashed cymbals while Sally grimaced and clawed at his bass and Sparhawk ate his guitar strings, a method of soloing he confessed to have ripped off from Def Leppard.
Low's flirtation with rock convention has blossomed beyond mere decibels into a full-fledged love affair with song structure. ''Broadway (So Many People)," ''California," and ''Walk Into the Sea" were glorious deconstructions. Loud verses and quiet choruses, sunny anthems heralding disaster, and epic fades added weirdly familiar colors to Low's exploding palette. For those who fret that their beloved underground band is inching toward the mainstream, rest assured that Low's embrace of the normal sounds less like capitulation than liberation -- from an underground manifesto that can be as confining as a pop hook.
Pedro the Lion, a foursome from Seattle that's actually a shifting front for indie-pop tunesmith Davad Bazan, played an opening set of gauzy melodic alt fare in support of ''Achilles Heel," Pedro the Lion's fifth and most irresistible album.
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.
