Alan Sparhawk
With Trampled by Turtles
SUB POP
Alan Sparhawk’s first creative response to the death of his wife and creative partner in Low was very much the unexpected. Inspired largely by the couple’s kids and their friends messing around on synths in the band’s studio, 2024’s White Roses, My God came two years after Mimi Parker’s death and was a surprisingly joyful sonic journey, one that reveled in the thrill of experimental creation rather than lean on the melancholy, mournful moods that underpinned so many of Low’s songs in their 29 year-long career. It didn’t totally eschew sadness, which would seep through the synths and modified vocals here and there, but that wasn’t the salient emotion of the album.
With Trampled by Turtles—a description of this follow-up record’s collaboration with the titular bluegrass band (and fellow Duluth residents)—changes all of that. Much more the record that one might have expected Sparhawk to make the first time around, its nine songs are drenched in sorrow, in absence, in longing, in dark devastation. That’s most overt on the heartbreaking lament of “Not Broken,” which features Sparhawk and Parker’s daughter Hollis, her vocals filling her mother’s shoes much earlier than they should’ve had to be filled. It’s impossible to not think of Parker singing those lines, which makes for a song that’s very much the opposite of its title, yet somehow still shimmers with a sense of at least some kind of hope and light.
While that’s perhaps the pinnacle of this record’s despair, it certainly isn’t just confined to those three and a half minutes. Opener “Stranger” defiantly wrestles with the nature of loss over a solemn death-march melody, while the sparse “Screaming Song” is driven by a sense of ever-present grief and loss—a lacuna filled with its own emptiness—and “Don’t Take Your Light” is a forlorn plea already gone unanswered, all the more maudlin as a result. And then there’s the final track, “Torn & in Ashes,” another final goodbye that will never be final. It’s sad and soft, yet full of an understandable anger at the unfairness of Parker’s death from cancer at the age of 55. Though With Trampled by Turtles can’t bring her back, it’s a beautiful and touching tribute to a life and love that went too soon.
