33 1/3 Revelations: RIP Low’s Mimi Parker

LOW RIP Mimi Parker

Exactly a year ago I was falling in love with Low’s 13th album, Hey What and extolling its virtues as my favourite album of 2021. As I write now, founding member Mimi Parker has just died of cancer, inspiring a wave of grieving across the world. Low was not the kind of band that attracted passing admirers. If you were in, you were all in. Very few of their contemporaries produced so much consistently great material. None of those peers were as relentlessly brave and progressive over three decades. Which makes it very difficult to pick out a favourite Low record. 2005’s The Great Destroyer puts its hand up as a milestone and should be in everyone’s vinyl collection. It is probably the most successful balance of Low’s quietest and noisiest approaches sweeping from barely whispered harmonies to roaring guitars and thumping snares. And nearly every song has its pop earworm without diluting the sinister tension that makes so much of their music so affecting. While the tools Low employed evolved from album to album, that gist was established at the opening song of album one and never wavered. With just a couple of guitars, a drumkit and two voices, Parker and her partner Alan Sparhawk transported us listeners to dark, strange, unforgettable places. Parker’s understated rhythms (she set out with just one snare, one tom and one cymbal using only brushes) and ethereal harmonies were fundamental to the band – its signature. Their debut album, I Could Live In Hope is still as chilling as when it was released and is now ultra-collectable. People charge over $100 just for a CD copy! Things We Lost in the Fire (2001) was another landmark album for the band. From the opening line “When they found your body,

By Martin Jones

giant X’s on your eyes” the album is riveting, electric guitars and (slightly) heavier drums phased in, Parker and Sparhawk singing every word in harmony. ‘Sunflower’ is a song that, once heard, is never forgotten. Songs from this album, like ‘Dinosaur Act’, became set staples. The same year Low and The Dirty Three collaborated on the revered In The Fishtank 7. Then there’s 2002’s Trust which began to see a broader (though still spartan) soundscape, the band using increasingly treated electric guitars and electronics. Songs like ‘(That’s How You Sing) Amazing Grace’ and ‘John Prine’ saw a reach from personal subject matter into popular culture. The band finished on a high, Hey What an uncompromising culmination of all preceding Low. More austere and terrifying than anything before, fuzzed out broken down and glitchy electronics threatening to completely disintegrate, challenging the listener with industrial noise making the relief of those sweet harmonies all the more coveted. Parker was diagnosed with cancer in late 2020. How much of that informs Hey What? I guess only Sparkhawk knows that. But it is undeniably apocalyptic. The opening song is built on the chorus “Still, white horses take us home.” Their first and last album as a duo, it is almost devoid of the guitar and drums instrumentation of their origins, scathing pixelated stabs and swarms of machine tortured sound stamping and soaring through the songs. It’s left to those married (literally) voices to provide the humanity in starker than ever contrast. It’s tumultuous, challenging, beautiful and, ultimately, unforgettable – a fitting eulogy for Mimi Parker.