This time last year, Low were due to headline Le Guess Who, an experimental music festival in Utrecht. Instead, the beloved US indie band had to cancel their tour dates owing to the declining health of singer and drummer Mimi Parker, who had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years prior. On 5 November 2022, she died at home in Duluth, Minnesota, aged 55. Her loss essentially brought to an end the haunting, hymnal group that she and husband Alan Sparhawk formed in 1993, having first met in primary school, and which had entered a period of near warp-speed evolution in their final two albums, 2018’s distorted, furious Double Negative and 2021’s Hey What.
Until this return to Le Guess Who, Sparhawk has only performed music in Duluth and in Minneapolis, in two bands that include their son, Cyrus, as a member (they also have a daughter, Hollis): the Roy Ayers and Curtis Mayfield-inspired funk outfit Derecho and Afro-Cuban four-piece Damien, in which Sparhawk has been known to perform dressed as a ship’s captain. On Saturday night to a packed Protestant church, it initially seems as though his highly anticipated solo debut might tend to the former: Sparhawk on guitar, his long, grizzled hair suggesting a heavy metal priest; Cyrus on bass; Owen Mahon on drums; and Dave Carroll on banjo, opening with Liquid Love, a wiggly, open-ended instrumental funk workout with a jazzy refrain that sits somewhere between Thundercat and Chicago post-rockers the Sea and Cake.
