HEY WHAT: a tribute to Mimi Parker— and a masterpiece at the end of the line
Throughout the past year, I have found myself returning over and over again to HEY WHAT, the 2021 album release that will now be Low’s last. It’s an album that has stuck with me in a way that very few have in the past couple of years. And now, listening to it through the prism of Mimi Parker’s passing from ovarian cancer at the age of 55, it has taken on added weight, added depth. It truly is a modern masterpiece, that we now know was made in the shadow of Parker’s diagnosis.
I was a latecomer to Low. It was a name I had heard for years, but never quite got around to checking out until, in 2015, I heard the song “No Comprende”. The menace and clarity of the song made me sit up and pay attention enough to investigate the album it came from, which was Ones & Sixes. Though the rest of the album took a while to reveal itself to me, I was immediately hooked by the song “Lies”. It had everything I love in a rock song, the tone of the guitar chords was beautiful, it was somehow urgent but unhurried, the melodies were gorgeous and it all built to a glorious crescendo, with Mimi’s voice sweeping into its upper register.
On the second to last song, the epic “Landslide”, I remember noticing some buzzing, distorted sounds as the song thundered slowly to its conclusion. At first I wondered if the album had been mixed at a level my headphones couldn’t cope with but, no matter where I listened to it, the crunching effect was there — and later I would learn this was the first step on a new journey for the band with producer BJ Burton, together with whom they would rip up the template of what Low, or any rock band for that matter, could sound like.
On the follow up album, Double Negative, they plunged headfirst into a jarring, disorientating new sound — one that would have listeners checking their stereo wasn’t breaking during the opening few bars of first track “Quorum”. Despite the incredible creative risk, Low would earn universal critical acclaim and admiration, from an audience that was staggered that a band on the verge of completing its third decade could reinvent its sound so completely, and so singularly. They had taken their sound and absolutely ripped it to pieces, in a way so few bands, young or old, would ever be prepared to do. It sounded like no-one else on earth.
Whatever the songs on Double Negative had started life as, they were so broken and warped by the digital studio effects, they came out the other side sounding like alien broadcasts. The boundaries of the songs were gone, obliterated by rasping, shattering blasts of digital distortion. It was like hearing a broken distress signal from beyond the end of the world — which, given the album was released a year and half into the Trump presidency — at the time didn’t seem so far away.
The amazing thing about HEY WHAT is it was the perfect follow up to an album that felt like it couldn’t be followed. What was immediately noticeable, in comparison to its predecessor, was that — despite the fact the instruments had been just as messed up by the studio effects that made Double Negative such a striking, unprecedented album — this time the vocals had escaped. The harmonies were high and bright in the mix, with a clarity and humanity that lent HEY WHAT a degree of light that contrasted it against the relentless darkness of its predecessor.
There are almost no obvious drums on the record. Instead the rhythms seem to be created by warping the other instruments to the point they find their own pulse. The rhythm for the second track — the gorgeous, pulsating “I Can Wait” — is generated from a deteriorating guitar noise that tumbles from the end of opener “White Horses”, while “All Night” floats in on a humming, loping mix of digital sound and processed vocals
At other times there are no rhythms at all. In the flawless middle section of the record, their are long washes of ambient drift, but the band’s grip on dynamics never leaves them. “Disappearing” is still one of the most incredible rock songs I have heard in recent years. The buzzing thunder of distorted, woozy guitar washes in and out, as Sparhawk and Parker’s gorgeous harmonies unfurl towards the disappearing horizon.
“Disappearing” is followed by “Hey”, a towering piece of music that allows Mimi Parker’s otherworldly voice to take centre stage. Again there are no drums, or really anything resembling a guitar, just soundscapes that rise and fall beneath the perfect melody. In the second half of the song, Parker’s voice becomes an echoing “Hey”, as the ambient soundscapes take over — before the firecracker melody of “Days Like These” cuts in at just the perfect moment.
Listening to the album now, knowing that while it was being recorded, Mimi Parker was fighting a much harder battle than was publicly known, and one that she would eventually lose, makes some sections of it almost unbearable to listen to — in particular the moment in “Don’t Walk Away” when Sparhawk and Parker sing to each other, “I have slept beside you for what feels a thousand years”. It has a kind of inverse effect to “Sleepless Nights” by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris — where Harris was singing her vocal take alone in a darkened vocal booth, after Parsons had already passed, instead Sparhawk and Parker are singing their timeless love to each other, as their time together is running out.
It’s now impossible to read “More”, the song that tears through the speakers as “Don’t Walk Away” fades out, as anything other than Mimi letting rip against her fate: “I gave more than what I should have lost/I paid more than what it would have cost.” Again, when I first listened to the record, it never occurred to me that she could be singing about her illness — now it seems impossible to have been anything else.
“I’ve put a lot of thought/Into the price you pay”, sings Sparhawk at the start of the final track, another line that carries so much more weight. But it’s a song that also gives the listener something that Low have so often, deliberately, held back on offering. So much of their back catalogue is built on the idea of tension without release — but here, as the drums finally, recognisably, kick in, the song offers catharsis. In fact, as the song soars to its conclusion, with Sparhawk and Parker’s gorgeous voices melding one more time, there’s a profound sense of release.
In recent years, I had enjoyed following Low on Twitter. Their account projected a warmth to fellow musicians and their fans, and a kind of righteous empathy for all those who were being marginalised by much of America’s embrace of the far right of the Republican party. On November 6, Alan Sparhawk’s announcement of Mimi Parker’s passing was one of the simplest, most beautiful, most heartbreaking things I have ever read. It was followed by a remarkable outpouring of grief from a legion of fans around the world, as well as some of alternative music’s most important names. Parker clearly touched a lot of people — personally, as well as through her music and through her voice.
The double tragedy of Mimi Parker’s death is that it is also the death of Low. This was a band that had just reached a new peak — incredible enough for a band in their early 50s, let alone one making some of the most groundbreaking rock music on earth.
But Low was never just a band. It was a marriage. Parker’s understated drumming and celestial singing voice were as central as Sparhawk’s voice and guitar. Their voices meshed so perfectly that the sound of Low was the sound of them together. And perhaps that’s why, more than two weeks later, I still feel affected by her death— and why I am still listening to very little else.
As fans we became, in a small sense, part of the marriage at the heart of the band. And the grief we may feel over the loss of Mimi Parker as a result is tempered by the love that resonates out toward us through Low’s music — that remains unchanged, their voices together, echoing into eternity.
