Alan Sparhawk and Trampled by Turtles – the sky tears open

Mimi Parker died in November 2022, which was blessed with one of the most beautiful voices in the indie rock. Low, the band, in The parker together with her husband Alan Sparhawk has recorded around 15 albums in almost thirty years, always sounded like a gentle opposition to the dominance aesthetics of rock in all its forms. Regardless of whether low as in the early days of the band, it was experimentally balanced how much you could drive down the pace and reduce the means without breaking the song or dissolving your own music in noise and surfaces: this music was always one of two voices that changed, penetrated and added.

With the death of Parker and her voice there was an empty space that did not even try to fill Alan Sparhawk on his first solo album “White Roses, My God” (2024) and instead put a stranger on his voice, which contradicted the entire low-aesthetics, to his voice. “White Roses, My God” was – because the voices of Low, which had always been comforting until then, were both missing both, one dead not to recognize the other – a kind of depressing foreign body that solved nothing. But it asked the big questions to the dead: »Heaven / It’s a Lonely Place IF You’re Alone / I Wanna Bee The People That I love / Maye some that you, who who gonna be there / yeah you / are you gonna be there«.

For his second solo album after the death of his wife, Sparhawk came together with the Bluegrass/indie folk band Trampled by Turtles, and the sky tears. Alan Sparhawk’s voice sounds so clear and present as it has not been present since “Drums & Guns”. This is quite a force in conjunction with the music, which is very emphasized here and indestructible. Heard, “White Roses, My God” and “Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles” seem like two attempts that are made at short intervals to give grief a voice. At first it was clear that the voice had to be disappeared and one other had to be. The feelings find their electronically alienated expression by manifesting the non-processability of the experienced.

At the second album you can now hear that someone has found access and can sing out of the middle again. And with all the strength. Ghost music, also – not in the sense of the scary, but in the fact that the loved one is present. Hollis, the daughter of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, sings “Not Broken” in a duet with her father and sounds very much like her mother and yet her own: “It’s not broken / I’m not angry”. An incredible song actually.

Two pieces from the previous album were re -recorded with Trampled by Turtles – with banjo, guitars, violins and choirs. Including the quoted “Heaven”, which now no longer sounds tight and questioning, but as if the singer was sure in the heart that he will see the “People That I Love” when it is time. It doesn’t have to be right – you don’t know what’s coming when it is over. But the music of low is not there posthumously to announce truths, but to bring comfort – if not hope, at least – at least -.

Alan Sparhawk: »Alan Sparhawk With Trampled By Turtles« (Sub Pop/Cargo)