After the starburst of The Great Destroyer, Low’s Alan Sparkhawk fell into crisis. He began questioning his career — not to mention sanity — and took a turn with his longtime band down darker alleys with last year’s Drums & Guns. Cutting back The Great Destroyer’s glimmering noise bursts and coiling his simplest songs to the verge of snapping, Drums & Guns’ biggest impact came in its lack of release.

Much like Sparhawk’s earlier side project, The Black-Eyed Snakes, the Mark Kozelek-produced Retribution Gospel Choir turns up the volume and spits fire where Drums & Guns quietly poisoned the well. To complete the paradox, Drums’ moody and minimalist centrepiece “Breaker”” is re-cast as a power-chord anthem that, while it follows the same lyrical and chord-progression as the original, comes from a different planet entirely.

While this about-face approach to “Breaker” works as an interesting look inside of Sparhawk’s process (and makes one wonder how hard it’s got to be to consistently have held back so often with Low for all these years), Retribution Gospel Choir lacks both the unbreakable chemistry of Low and the frightening exuberance of The Black-Eyed Snakes. When the riffs approach bar-band lows (“Somebody’s Someone,” “For Her Blood”), it’s best to think of Retribution Gospel Choir as a momentary sideline — an artist having held back for long enough and just needing to rock out for a moment, before getting back to what he does best.