Alan Sparhawk
Opium
★★★★★
“Terrified” is how Alan Sparhawk describes his feelings about starting his tour off in Dublin, given that it is a city that has always meant something to him, and to Low, the band he shared with his late wife Mimi Parker for almost 30 years.
Much of this evening’s concert takes us through Sparhawk’s recent solo record White Roses, My God, named as such, because Parker liked roses, and because sometimes Sparhawk thinks “she is God”. And what is “God” if not a principal object of faith? And faith is a subject that is also visited and revisited in this show.
Accompanied by his son Cyrus on bass, Sparhawk rips through the first half of the set, with songs like I Made This Beat showcasing his discerning taste in beats, so swaggering and rich. The spectre of hip-hop flits around the stage, and there is something about that form that lends itself to shows of strength, certainly in theory, perhaps a quality Sparhawk is channelling this evening. That thread binds itself to the first part of the show as Sparhawk, with pitch-shifting vocoder vocals, takes us through a record that relies heavily on free association lyrics, which is pleasingly dislocating.
At times Sparhawk resembles Huckleberry Finn as man, a wayward yet sincere revelator in dungarees – at one point he raises his arms, beckoning us in, and gathering us up, as he sings Get High in all its discordant beauty, as well as conjuring the spiritual component of dub on the vibrating beats of Station.
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Heaven signifies a sea-change, as the vocal effects are put aside, and guitar takes flight. That song, so flooring, sad and true, speaks of heaven as a “lonely place if you’re alone”, and Sparhawk reminds us that everything is ephemeral, an acute realisation that is the lifeblood of this show. It is there in the anecdote about touring that leads into Princess Road Surgery, and it is there in the sense of the sweet heartbreak of Impossible Day, “don’t you think it’s weird that we got even this far?” – a new song that he continues to add to and be in conversation with.
There are so many highlights, Sparhawk’s wistful croon on White Horses, and the tender bounce of Get Still, but more generally, it is about how he explores ideas of loss while managing to convey a sense of generosity and playfulness in the face of that loss. Because so many of the lyrics on White Roses, My God were improvised, the show seems visceral and deeply impressionistic, with an acknowledgment that we are all improvising, aren’t we? It is very moving to see someone live amid a state of abjection with such grace. In The Four Loves, CS Lewis wrote that art is essentially “unnecessary”, “…it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival” – tonight Sparhawk’s performance is proof of that.
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