Skip to main content

Half Low. Full King.


Half Low; Full King  - Appreciations.

Alan Sparhawk and a full-throated audience opened for Halloween Alaska at St. Paul’s Turf Club this week.  Too bad most attendees used the opening hour to hollar at each other rather than listen to the Low leader’s intricate intense solo set.  Sparhawk gradually set deep computer beats, brought up an understated electric guitar and used heavily processed vocals to weave mysterious melodies into his songs.  Absolutely no chance to understand one line of the lyrics.  Thus space music: intricate, contemplative.   Imploring vocals had been mis-processed in an intergalactic satellite’s attempt to forward a message concerning another world’s analogue to deity.   We missed that message in the cacophony.  Or maybe just Jim Morrison come back to re-inhabit some Scots-Irish blues.  This was complicated, carefully wrought music.  Time for me to get the most recent Low recording.  

At the very outset of this, my first time with Halloween Alaska live, I said: “this is Dave King’s best place.”  Monstrous from moment to moment, he was as big as he is in the Bad Plus jazz band while having to make the right space the three-Fender + keyboard line up of the rock band.  (King’s style/ego/talent/whatever put me off last year when he and the Bad Plus hosted guitarist Bill Frissel at the Walker.  It seemed that King tried to take that show to corners he’d hidden from Frissel with Frssel’s guitar improvisations therefore often moving from half-lost to half-hearted.  Now, their bold, bold  Le Sacre de Printemps, that’s a much different matter….)   

HA’s recorded work uses great care in recording and engineering to highlight lead singer James Diers’ often-breathy vocals to both convey interesting words and an intriguing sound.  A live set misses much of these two features of the band - but the HA demonstrated funky rock cred with good guitar work, occasional harmonizing and always, big shouldered drumming.   I think I caught some interesting lyrics:  “get away with anything…”  “you laugh, the road beside, you love….”  HA also touched close to a few of the sophisticated soundscapes I love on their eponymous 2005 release (and the Champagne Downtown LP [2009] I bought last night.)  

This was a “record release show” for a new album, something Diers claimed to be the conclusion of a “tantric process”.  Not clear what sort of process this was, but “Le Centre” will have to be a delayed climax for hardware types as no CDs or LPs were found at the merch table.  Has commerce killed the rock star record?  

Jay Wilkinson 12/15/18  

“Am I old enough to have the ambition to be the most aged at every other show?”

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milo Fine and Anthony Cox August 30, 2025. An Appreciation with Digressions.

Studio Toile d’Angles was carved out of a near north Minneapolis lot and erected next door to the home of Milo Fine, Minnesota’s least compromised multi-instrumentalist, composer and instigator of modern music.  Rectangular and sunk in the land, it is maybe 18 x 30 feet; the roof points to high north and descends covered with solar panels toward the south and inside meets a wall ten feet above the floor. A kitchenette and bathroom are in a back corner. No street shoes permitted.  Twenty or so moveable padded chairs, a couch and cushions are set in loose rows seven feet from Cox and his cello. The front row audience is six feet from the end of Fine’s black lacquer Bosendorpher Imperial piano. It is nine feet six inches long and includes nine notes lower than a concert grand’s 88. Debussy, Bartok and Ravel were early adopters. Capable, I am sure, of near-Richter scale waves, Fine’s often emphatic playing still left space for Cox’s bowed, plucked, tapped, and picked cello.  ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Refugees All

Among my forebears are the Schwenkfelders, reformation-era sectarians who emigrated from Silesia (now part of southwestern Poland) to Pennsylvania in 1700s, with stops in several German states and the Netherlands. These were followers of Caspar Schwenkfeld, who in the early 1500s had earned the enmity of Martin Luther because of doctrinal disputes.  They were despised by both Catholics and Lutherans.  The main issues in contention were whether infants should be baptized ("no" said my folks) and whether bread and wine were really Jesus's flesh and blood in communion ("no" said  my folks).  They thought that individuals' direct and unmediated pursuit of salvation through faith in Jesus and God was the way.     As minor states in the region became increasingly sectarian and rulers came and went, the pacifist Schwenkfelders, who also believed in strict separation of church and state, became targets. Their books were burned. Those who hid the books were...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flashing Negatives

Flashing Negatives  Mississippi, south-bound at summer solstice  endorphins wheeling  eyes down  sensing  without seeing:        a loss in the leaves        a disappearance  and again        a break in the phone line        an absence  and again        a topped-off light pole        a vanishing  and again  and again       and now,        a flashing eclipse in a bough.  The gorge’s green palisade drops  and I am jarred because  a high-looping stone’s throw  west of my shoulder,  wings are beating my cadence and keeping pace.  That fierce-eyed, lovely, troublesome symbol spirit  casting performance art in raptor shadows.  Dr. Kramer (Captain of the Carl Jung) called:       “I’ve got those m...
Post a Comment
Read more