Alan Sparhawk
With Trampled By Turtles
★★★★
SUB POP
“There’s a running joke in our town,” Alan Sparhawk told a German reporter in 2011. “It says you can’t make a record in Duluth without a banjo on it. The banjo is the sound that signals white people to start drinking and dancing.”
For most of the past three decades, however, Sparhawk has presented a quite different sound of Duluth to the rest of the world; one more evocative of “the slate gray skies and the mysterious foghorns” that another famous son, Bob Dylan, mythologised in Chronicles. Between 1993 and 2022, Sparhawk’s musical energies were concentrated on Low alongside his late wife, Mimi Parker, and on an often stark, slow, musically and emotionally unflinching kind of music. When a rare banjo appeared on their records – on 2011’s stunned, majestic Witches, for instance – it was as a deep textural detail, rather than a signal to party.
As Low steadily established themselves as one of the era’s great American bands, another Duluth group were building a reputation for themselves, too. A self-described “hippy bluegrass band”, Trampled By Turtles on the surface appear to be closer to Sparhawk’s stereotype of the local sound – their record label, after all, is called BanjoDad. But smalltown music scenes can forge unlikely allegiances, and if this first studio collaboration between Sparhawk and Trampled By Turtles isn’t exactly a record born of joy and abandon, it is one which presents the collective energy of music-making as an ineluctable force for good. A community comes together in bad times, too.
Parker died of cancer in November 2022, and in September 2024, Sparhawk released a solo album that amounted to a radical and literal processing of his pain. White Roses, My God was a solitary, purgative reckoning, and made new capital out of the electronic currents that had increasingly come to the fore in Low’s music. Most strikingly, Sparhawk’s plaintive vocals were pitchshifted, bent and stretched unnervingly out of shape by Auto-Tune, so that the album had none of the sonic signifiers we usually associate with unmediated mourning.
Grief, though, constantly manifests in new ways, and constantly requires new methods to address it. With Trampled By Turtles is the sonic opposite of White Roses… – an all-acoustic album recorded in a day, with old friends providing musical and spiritual support. Sparhawk has long betrayed a love of Neil Young, in his molten electric guitar tones as well as his membership of a Neil tribute band, Tired Eyes. In Trampled By Turtles he’s found his Stray Gators, a nimble and empathetic troupe who can tease out the folk resonances in his songs and his voice.
The banjo – played by the Turtles’ Dave Carroll, who was also on duty for Witches – is crucial. But so is Ryan Young’s fiddle, and never more so than when it provides abrasive counterpoint for the album’s heartbreaking centrepiece, Screaming Song (Low fans might be reminded of Lordy, a 2001 hook-up with The Dirty Three). “So if you and I love is forever,” Sparhawk sings, with a calmness that only amplifies the trauma. “Then I’ll probably be screaming that long.”
A tough listen, then, but With Trampled By Turtles is also rooted in acts of solace. Heaven is one of two resilient, adaptive songs re-imagined from White Roses…, rousing where once it was provisional. When the massed voices and instruments of Trampled By Turtles kick in around 1:26, it’s ineffably moving, not least because it locates a power akin to that found in a Low crescendo like Silver Rider.
“Sometimes your voice is not enough,” Sparhawk sang on Silver Rider, and the harmonic absence of Parker is inevitably more pronounced on an organic album like this than it was on White Roses… Three tracks here – Too High, Princess Road Surgery and Not Broken – were originally conceived as Low songs, and it’s the last of those that provides one more reminder of where Sparhawk has come from, and where he is now.
Not Broken is a chamber-folk song led by Eamonn McLain’s cello, the banjo and mandolin joining in with harp-like discretion, and Sparhawk’s voice intertwined with a female foil as it did on so many Low tracks. The singer is Sparhawk and Parker’s daughter, Hollis, and her voice is both uncannily familiar and magically new: one more poignant epiphany, one more consolation, on an album freighted with them.
With Trampled By Turtles is out 30 May on Sub Pop
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Track lisiting:
Stranger
Too High
Heaven
Not Broken
Screaming Song
Get Still
Princess Road Surgery
Don't Take Your Light
Torn & In Ashes
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