Alan Sparhawk played The Sinclair – 4/3
Former Low co-leader Alan Sparhawk brought his solo tour to Cambridge with support from Circuit Des Yeux.
__________
In my show previews column for this month, I wondered which Alan Sparhawk would greet us at The Sinclair as part of his spring tour. Following the tragic, untimely passing of wife and bandmate Mimi Parker in 2022, Sparhawk dissolved their long-running slowcore institution Low, played in a funk-tinged ensemble joined by the couple’s two children, released a left-field electronic album, and just recently announced an LP backed by his friends in the folk-rock band Trampled By Turtles. That’s a lot of ground covered in just a few years, and as it turned out, Thursday night’s spellbinding show at The Sinclair would touch on all of it.
Backed by a rhythm section that still included his son Cyrus on bass, Sparhawk began the night in the vocoder-cranked, beats-banging world of last year’s White Roses, My God. That record is probably the last thing most fans expected out of Sparhawk’s debut solo venture, and the stage show – which found him in constant motion, clutching a microphone, swinging a hoodie over his head and getting up close with the crowd – was similarly jarring. It was a side of the artist that Low’s glacial, gorgeous shows never allowed for, and it felt cathartic – even profound – to see it loosed in such ecstatic fashion. It was brave. It was punk rock.
Just as jarring, then, was the moment that Sparhawk switched off that mic, picked up a guitar, and strummed an utterly heartbreaking song clear of the voice-processing haze about 30 minutes later. The remainder of the set proceeded in more familiar territory, previewing some of the forthcoming With Trampled By Turtles, covering family-favorite “Liquid Love” by the late Roy Ayers, and even tackling a single Low song (HEY WHAT opener “White Horses,” somewhat ironically shed of the album version’s glitched framework). The new songs were vintage Sparhawk – toweringly sad and defiantly hopeful all at once – and the three-piece swung deftly from hushed confessionals to post-rock crescendos.
Low were a longtime personal favorite of mine, and it’s truly heartening to see the band’s surviving half soldiering forth in the face of grief and loss to deliver something like Thursday’s set – surprising, stirring, uncompromising. The band always marched to its own beat, and so it goes for Sparhawk’s endeavors henceforth.
Opening up the night was a set from Circuit Des Yeux, the shapeshifting project of Chicago’s Haley Fohr. Her latest, March’s Halo on the Inside, takes a dive into gothic, industrial and darkwave sonics, channeling Violator-era Depeche Mode via neoclassical high drama. Her dramatically-silhouetted set, which featured just Fohr’s arresting voice and a bank of backing tracks, showcased those new songs in compelling fashion (though I can only imagine they’d sound even more huge with the luxury of a full band).
Check out photos from both sets below.
