“Just Make It Stop,” the first track I heard from Low’s The Invisible Way, sounded equal parts frantic and repetitive. The franticness in the repetitive put me off a bit, before I heard the song coordinated within the whole; before I put on headphones and a thinking cap.

Low, a longtime Sub Pop band, native Minnesotans, arrive in Seattle on Saturday night to play the Crocodile. Their new album finds them coping quite well with brisker tempos, thank you very much — that’s for the pundits who like to stick an “S” in front of their name. (Come to think of it, that was only one dear old ex-best-friend of mine, and he wanted the headliner, Nick Cave, and he wanted him yesterday.) Jeff Tweedy produced this, which doesn’t mean the trio’s gone country. “Country,” which, as judged by a recent trip to Jimmy Mac’s Roadhouse, finds itself clumped into predictable rebus:  “truck,” “bottle,” “jukebox,” “hat,” and yes, “country,” codified and shifted around to sing out limited messages.

Rather, Low, with Tweedy, go where country should go. Fatalism sitting side-by-side with hope, two flavor stripes in the ice cream carton, scoop up your own bowl.  Drums & Guns, the last Low LP I cared about deeply, questioned personal responsibility for violence (by extension, the irony of that blood atonement preached by, and the blood pooled around the founding of, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s LDS faith). This one’s about beauty and joy. Formalized, sometimes mannered beauty and joy, and the suggestion of being shattered by the transcendental experience (“To Our Knees”) but beauty and joy nevertheless.

“On My Own,” the penultimate track, drops into a half-time drag-and-pound guitar-twitchfest making you hear what Robert Plant heard in this bunch when he covered two of their songs.  Zeppelin, though, probably wouldn’t end that exercise with a gout of “Happy Birthday”s. Birth, as Stephen King commented, is wonderful, but not beautiful. Too brutal, finally, for beautiful. Unless you think to yourself: Is there in beauty no brutality?

So it looks like we’re back to country’s country. But this, at least, Johnny Cash would understand.