Grief Is A Thing That Echoes - Alan Sparhawk. Norwich 2025

Grief Is A Thing That Echoes: Alan Sparhawk 

Norwich Arts Centre: Thursday 14^th August 2025

Alan Sparhawk: A Man Possessed by Grief and Love

Alan Sparhawk’s enthralling two-part show left a deep impression. This was rock music as art.  The American delivered a moving performance addressing his enduring grief at the loss of his wife and musical partner, Mimi Parker.  The couple made music as LOW, together producing a series of fascinating and sometimes challenging albums, pushing the definition of music.  It is music that epitomises the sound of the slowcore genre, featuring distorted vocals and guitars, slow rhythms, bursts of static and pulsing electronic noise.  It is not to everyone’s liking.  Some find the music disturbing, but LOW managed to consistently extract some quite beautiful songs from these ingredients.

 

Following Mimi Parker’s illness and death.  Alan Sparhawk was bereft.  The second coherent song of his performance sincerely communicated the weight of his personal loss.  Screaming Song captures the stomach punch of bereavement and its raw, enduring agony.  I use the word ‘coherent’ to mark out the split in the show.  The first part was grief expressed through dance and vocals.  Sparhawk twisted and shook, gesticulated, pointed and contorted himself as he danced, wrapping and unwrapping the mic cable around his arms, with the mic glued to his mouth under his shaking mass of blond-coloured long hair. The distortion of his voice, distortions changed by a concentrated application of electronic pedals, made it impossible to catch more than a single word of his vocals, but hearing individual words in this part was not really the point.  The point was to witness and feel the impact on Sparhawk of his dear wife’s struggles with illness and her loss.

The opening act, Kogomaza

Kogomaza: do their thing

, another trio, did their job, but besides playing within the slowcore genre and lacking any vocal input, they provided thin fayre.  Their long tunes lacked emotion and complexity.  A good part of the night’s audience heard them out and applauded keenly, but the sound to me, was as if they were still learning to play their instruments.  Playing slow music with few notes is not easy.  Alan Sparhawk attested to their friendship and humanity, but musically they need to work out quite what it is that they are seeking to produce. It was a little dull.

Once Alan Sparhawk’s made his entrance with the swaying tones of Get Still  the crowd were entranced, although ears more satisfied by traditional song, were undoubtedly bemused by what they heard.  Visually, this long-haired, slight, willowy figure, stripped to the waist, was mesmerising.  Anyone walking in from the street would have known immediately that this was a man struggling with his sanity.  

His performance was dramatic and a little distressing to see, even with a passing knowledge of what he must have been through as the love of his life wasted away.  However, what this authentically delivered performance was only truly explained when Sparhawk picked up his guitar and began to sing a set of songs that contextualised what had come before.  Heaven and Screaming Song cover the pain beautifully.  Later, Not Broken addresses the willingness to live on after the trauma of parting.

 

When Alan Sparhawk addresses the audience, a warm and loving person emerges.  The first thirty, or so,  minutes of his time on stage suggested that this guy might be a precious artiste, putting his work out there for the people to work out for themselves, but then he spoke to us.  His voice thick with emotion, he expressed gratitude for being able to play in the old church that provides such a superb music venue, and gratitude for having time with people who talk openly and smile, (that Olde Norvic Magic).  Sparhawk, so clearly a people person, referred back to the pandemic and appreciates the people who do come out, in the new sense of the term, ‘coming out’, i.e., walking away from the panoply of AV entertainment available in our domestic settings and interacting with others IRL. Sadly, too many have been groomed by TV and subsequent technology to stay home and consume entertainment online. 

 

Man At Work

The musicians providing rhythm section were Actual Wolf, (Eric Pollard) on drums and Sparhawk’s son, Cyrus on bass and vocals.  The simplicity of the musical set belied the complexity of sounds.  Effects pedals played an important part in the show.  

After Sparhawk managed to snap two guitar strings during an  epic number, Pollard and Cyrus S. improvised the Roy Ayers tune Liquid Love, while the lead man restrung his guitar.  Struggling with his eye-sight, Sparhawk was grateful to an audience member who offered over his own spectacles to help address the difficulty myopia presents to someone doing such close detail work.  The audience got into the groove of the tune, offering hand claps and finger clicks to the beat, and even while re-stringing and retuning, Alan Sparhawk sang along, “Oh, liquid love.” 

The strings and retuning took quite a while, but the audience held it together and conversations were kept brief, until the set could resume with Don’t Take Your Light.  This was another brief poetic number, released on the 2025 album Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles.

 Short poetic songs were the spine of the second part of the show with the harsh slowcore guitar, accompanying downbeat percussion and bass.  The mood-shift from the agonies of the first half-hour outpourings, a salve to the grief of White Roses, My God.

 

To conclude the evening, Sparhawk sang a new song, No More Darkness.  A hopeful, beautiful, spiritual song about just being with someone and appreciating the being together.  Alluding directly to his personal faith, a moment that “…turns my water into wine” and the final line, “Some holy ghost keeps me hanging on, hanging on.” this is a song that will be covered by many, more traditional singers, as it has the potential to become a massively popular lyric.  It is capable of meaning much to innumerable people worldwide.  A beautiful end to a stunning and moving evening. In truth, one of the best musical events I have ever witnessed.

Spencer Ide

17^th August 2025