It should really come as no surprise that it’s a heartbreaker, but Alan Sparhawk‘s second album since the tragic loss of Mimi Parker is also a beautifully human, warm, and healing thing. As much about the consolation of friends and family as the pain of devastation. With Trampled By Turtles is named simply for the band of long term companions with whom it was recorded, apparently in a single day.
On the off chance you’re unfamiliar, Trampled By Turtles are a long running Duluth based string band who make wonderful bluegrass informed Americana. Theirs and Sparhawk’s paths have long been entangled but somehow never previously made it onto record. This doesn’t sound like a one day session because what you’re hearing is years of friendship and empathy spill over onto tape. In the wake of Mimi’s death, the Turtles took Alan on tour to get him out the house, in a place he wouldn’t be alone. If White Roses, My God was a solitary record of harsh light and cold surfaces, so broken and angry its voice was smeared and choked this is the sound of connection, shared experience, voices raised together.
Mimi Parker’s voice and drumming are missing from this album but otherwise she is very much here. Some of these songs even began back with Low and many of course concern her loss. On one of these older songs ‘Not Broken’ her parts are sung by their daughter Hollis, a simultaneous heartbreak and joy. If that doesn’t have you wiping something out of your eye it leads directly into the album’s concise centrepiece ‘Screaming Song’. An emotional gut punch with Sparhawk’s vocals carried upwards on a swirling wordless chorus as the violin and cello take on the task of screaming. Across the record the band’s support of the songs is perfectly well judged.
Not simply an album about death or mourning, it is perhaps an album in spite of it. Death waits for us all and mostly we try not to think too much about that. Worse than that, it’s going to come and take those closest to us, leaving us broken. This crushing inevitability is, oddly, one of the most commonplace. It unites us all in sorrow. That it would seem, is how we can survive it, through the love of others. So, despite the pain that twists through it this is a very human and beautiful recording.
