“Steeped in the past, but evolving with every step, the Low Anthem are anything but folk revivalists” writes Stevie Chick -http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/04/low-anthem-charlie-darwin

Here is an extract from the article:

Charles Darwin, meanwhile, provided not only the ­title to the record and its opening and closing songs, but also the theme for the entire album. “We were wandering through the giraffe enclosure at ­Providence zoo,” remembers Miller, ­”talking about Darwin’s survival of the ­fittest theories, and how jarring that would seem to a person of faith. It was just this funny phrase we kept repeating to each other: ‘Oh my God! Charlie Darwin!’ But as we were ­writing the songs, they all seemed to ­circle around it like a hub, drawing a lot of their weight from the ­conflict that was in that joke. There’s a ­tension in the songs, between our human need for something comforting, like a sense of community, of love, and this bleak ­nihilism, this idea of everybody out for himself, ‘the strong will survive’, which seems so at odds with that.”

It’s the Darwinian darkness that gives the Low Anthem’s songs a weight, saving them from being the relics they fear. Instead of essaying some nostalgic, soft-focus Americana, they write sharply about America itself; the album’s lachrymose and haunting opener, Charlie Darwin, sings of the hope that powered the ­Mayflower across the Atlantic, but also the brutal impact of Manifest Destiny, the bitter cost of the American dream. “You can see the Mayflower as a symbol of hope, people seeking religious freedom, a search for home of their own,” says Miller. “But it was also a seaborn pathogen, which wiped out an entire population of natives with all these European diseases.”

Miller says the group don’t take sides in the war between God and Charlie Darwin, and that their songs are as much about hope as hopelessness. “We all have our own personal beliefs,” he offers, “and I don’t think our album has a ‘side’, when it comes to the value of religion. Even if there’s a Godlessness, a doubt in existence of God, in the songs, there’s equally that human longing for a God, for the sense of purpose that provides. That longing is there, and it’s religious in its way, just as anybody who gets on their knees and sends up a hopeful prayer has that same longing, that someone or something will answer it.”

Oh My God, Charlie Darwin is out now on Bella Union. The Low Anthem tour the UK this month