Midway through Low's performance at Ferndale's Magic Bag Saturday night, one audience member yelled to another across the room. Though unexceptional for any other rock performance, the intrusion visibly offended the rest of the crowd. Low's crawling, whispered, minimal dirges enveloped the audience in fragile silences, and any distraction was simply unwelcome.

The Duluth trio took the stage unassumingly enough for no one to notice; it wasn't until the first mournful guitar notes of "(That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace" from their recent album, Trust rang out that the crowd fell silent. Low played with a meditative determination accented by the occasional subdued freak-out.

Guitarist/vocalist Alan Sparhawk alternated between gently thumbing his telecaster and pounding on the strings, while bassist Zak Sally and drummer/vocalist Mimi Parker set up solid landmarks between the tense pauses. Sparhawk and Parker's fragile, austere vocal harmonies translated perfectly to the stage, where the two voices seemed to cling to each other for warmth over the chill of the instrumentation. Despite the occasional ambient noise, the venue's sound was pristine and well mixed, with only Parker's drums sometimes lacking the power of the studio recordings.

Low took most of the concert's material from Trust, filling out the set with a contemplative cover of Pink Floyd's "Fearless" along with a brief detour into Prince's "Purple Rain" during "Over the Ocean" from Low's 1996 album The Curtain Hits the Cast. The set was well designed, moving between muted extremes: quiet to (kinda) loud, slow to (relatively) fast, somber to (remotely) happy. The new material even found the band exploring new styles, including a lo-fi rocker complete with fuzz bass in "Canada," and a campfire sing along featuring three-part harmonies in "La La La Song".

As Sparhawk proclaimed during the first encore of the set, "Remember, man, we're quiet!" Silence is golden.