The Low country
A bereaved singer finds community in folk.
By John Mulvey.
Alan Sparhawk
Half-shell heroes: Alan Sparhawk (centre) with Trampled By Turtles.
Alexa Viscius/Cooper Baumgartner
★★★★
With Trampled By Turtles
SUB POP. CD/DL/LP/MC
“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.