Low: Classic or classic?

Nice!

tc psa: Tired Eyes at Turf Club tomorrow night. the one they played two years ago honestly one of my favorite shows ever.

I wish he would tour the Neil Young tribute. I don't think I've ever seen an act fail covering Neil Young, more should do it.

Alan is doing a tour I think; and he did a Friday I'm in Low on Instagram the other week, so it's good to see him active.

it's fantastic, best Neil Young covers I've ever seen. A lot of credit should go to longtime Mpls stalwart Rich Mattson from the Glentrustles, it's as much if not more his thing than Alan's

even more interesting:

Low's twitter said that tonight with be the debut of the Alan Sparhawk Solo Band, apparently a warm up for some European dates. This sounds like it will be different than Derecho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMbMWjpjmsA

this is a recording of the single solo show he played earlier this year. new material is very heavy on the vocoder

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/12/alan-sparhawk-review-le-guess-who-festival-utrecht

glad to have this review of his latest show, sounds similar to that opening set at Turf Club. he definitely played the ones identified as JCMF, Get High and Don't Take Your Light, along with some Derecho-y stuff. this captures a lot of what he played, esp. those last two, both very beautiful: "Others are piercingly direct in their desperate evocations of loss, raw and shellshocked, and often repeating single phrases that get heavier with each iteration."

looks like some of the tracks he played were derecho songs? "get high" and "want it back" were released a few months ago

Tired Eyes Live at Hook & Ladder Minneapolis MN on 2022-02-26 https://t.co/7BWxNesy8a via @internetarchive

Re-upping and thank you as always @lowtheband @richmattson @TheHookMpls

— John Oxley (@jeoxley1) November 18, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZwriY0HEaE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCu0uLb8AkY

'i could live in hope' came out 30 years ago today

Really great "it's Friday I'm in low" last week. Cyrus on bass

Well, "Lullaby" still makes me cry, so there's that.

Got tix to see Sparhawk play in Chicago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7i-wjCZhXw

professional footage of some of alan's new songs

Wow, his son looks so much like him.

There's a local band here called L0veblaster that is doing the exact classic Low instrumentation and approach. It's pretty good actually, but begs for comparison in a way I find distracting.

don't love that band name

i'm friends with them (the local band)! they're so good. what's hilarious is that they don't even listen to low and were kind of unaware of them, last time i played with them, lol! but i think people mention it to them all the time

really great to see alan playing shows again - i'll have to give that video a deeper listen later today

Oh huh, I read an interview with them where they said Low was one of their two favorite bands and that they wanted to try out the format. It's a nice record though.

(lol I agree about the name though)

haha, whoa! yeah i just found that interview! okeydokey then, no comment :) anyway they definitely fall into the non-musical low tradition of being incredibly sweet and supportive people in addition to talented musicians.

denying your most obvious influence is a grand rock tradition

Is it strange that I don’t really care about Alan’s music without Mimi?

what DO you do in his place? I fully support his decision to continue making music (and involving Cyrus) but Low is over, he said so himself, and finding another style that pleases the former fans isn't going to be easy any time - (I shudder to think of the alternatives: continuing Low with another female singer? Hologram Mimi?)

dude looks like thom yorke now & the band sounds like radiohead

I don't think it's weird, it was always the two of them. I mostly care out of goodwill for Alan, and out of curiosity about the music that comes out of this.

There is a lot of goodwill and I hope he can make it work for his family. I was however always much more into Mimi's voice.

I'm definitely curious to hear what he does next. if only because Retribution Gospel Choir was a fantastic and criminally underappreciate band and that was without Mimi.

I feel the world for him— I mean, my life has been utterly altered by cancer and death and pain in my family. So, I extend my love and support to him— I just don’t really want to listen to the music he makes, it simply makes me want to listen to Low

Yeah, cosign. There's more than enough beauty and pain in Low to keep me enthralled, I don't need to hear anything new from him.

I get it. I just consider it a testament to Low being one of the truly great, truly special bands of our times. I can't be duplicated or bettered. but I'll still keep up with him.

I think he’s had enough of a track record of making music outside of Low, and it has been varied, that I’m eager to hear whatever he releases next. And I don’t have any expectation that he’s going to make something that is supposed to be a, uh, new low.

I’m very at peace that Low’s catalogue is now complete. It’s a beautiful discography to behold.

Let's see... Their last few albums are some of the best reviewed and experimental of their career, and his side projects span a wide range of styles and sounds. Yeah, I can't see why anyone would be interested in what comes next. Ho hum.

idk why anyone would not want to hear what alan might put out at this point. absolutely no way he isn't capable of putting out his own "tonight's the night"

My wife came in and asked why I was listening to Pearl Jam. It’s not for me, but some bits sounded good.

Hideous Lump and Western, I am speaking only for myself, and also: I have not found much of his solo work that interesting, and also differ greatly from the ILX hivemind on the last few albums. I liked them, but Curtain, Things We Lost, and Secret Name will always be my favorites. About half of “Double Negative” is worth skipping afaic.

I do like HEY WHAT a lot better than DN, tho

I respect that Sparhawk needs to try new things to move on and find something that clicks, but I was not really into his set last night. Independently a lot of the ideas worked, more or less, but it felt indulgent in an uncomfortable way. About a third kind of a funk-soul thing (including covers of Roy Ayers and Childish Gambino), a few songs that fit sort of in the electro-clash mode (with electric percussion/drum machine and vocoder vocals), and a few songs that sounded a bit like electric Neil Young, so maybe more in his expected wheelhouse. But most of the lyrics were minimal, often just a few lines repeated, and the stylistic excursions felt a bit gimmicky to me (even though the playing was surprisingly solid). I assume this is what he's been up to as/in Derecho? The playing was all good, yet the set felt like watching a workshop. Which I guess it was, in a way, but if I didn't know he had the best intentions I'd almost call it trolling.

the funk/soul stuff, including the covers, is all from derecho yeah. the other stuff is unreleased new material but he seems to have a few different modes he's been writing songs recently in that are all very different which probably makes for a weird experience

i can't really blame the guy--glad he's still out there playing music.

i'm certainly looking forward to whatever solo album he comes up with, i think he's said he intends to keep working with bj burton

Yeah, I'm looking forward to whatever as well, it was just weird to see a guy who had worked with such laser focus for so many years suddenly come across a little scattershot.

I think he does really like playing with these guys (I mean, he better; his son is a great bassist, too), I'm just not sure I need any funk-soul from him, as fun as it is. I could imagine Derecho being its own thing and melancholy Sparhawk solo another. I could totally imagine a glitchy solo album from him, kind of like Neil's "Le Noise."

The playing was all good, yet the set felt like watching a workshop.

I'm guessing that he's literally workshopping material, before recording. Always hard to do if playing it live is part of your process, when people are coming out and paying for it (although playing bigger shows under his name instead of local gigs with Derecho does suggest that he's either more confident in it or could use the money?). And even harder when making a new body of work, as opposed to a band that can sneak in a few new tunes.

fwiw the audience was very supportive and receptive, though in my experience it's hard to get anyone to turn on an artist they love (let alone one who was recently dealt a tragedy). Not that anyone should have booed or anything, but after a few meandering or tentative genre explorations Sparhawk half-jokingly opened the floor to questions, and some dude yelled "yeah, how did you get so good!?!" And I thought, woah, slow down there, brown-noser. (Sparhawk's answer was, essentially, "practice.")

I think I would have preferred just a night of funk jams, tbh. They seemed to be having a lot of fun with that.

solo album from alan coming

Low’s Alan Sparhawk will release a solo album—titled White Roses, My God—under his own name this fall, according to a new interview ↓ https://t.co/D0rYOzbl5Q

— Pitchfork (@pitchfork) April 11, 2024

he has so many side projects locally it's hard to keep up. i'm not in mpls anymore but off the top of my head he's got derecho, retribution gospel choir, black eyed snakes, various neil young tributes, a ween cover band, and 2-3 i am forgetting atm. and sometimes he bills derecho as 'derecho rhythm section', not sure how/if that's different

sad i never caught him in NY mode before i moved

i also honestly admire that he also is a bigtime homer for and producer for local bands i'm too much of an asshole for. mpls heads will know who i'm talking about

anyway it's just cool that he's such a man about town. i've maybe posted this before but the last low show i saw was in a small forested grove exactly half a mile from my childhood home. pretty special experience, been listening to low since i was a teen stealing CDs from my big brother and i hadn't made it out to that area in a long time

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/alan-sparhawk-the-heart-of-low the full interview referenced in the Pitchfork news item

That's great. Funny that Bruce Adams is reduced to "music writer," but I guess it would be harder (or take a few more words) to describe the more important role he played. Though the article does bring up Sub Pop, so I dunno.