“I’M finding it difficult to approach music from where Low was,” admits Alan Sparhawk, understandably, following the tragic loss of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker to cancer last November. “Whether it’s the songs, or trying to even just imagine ‘What is this? Where am I?’” So rather than inhabiting Low’s headspace, Sparhawk’s current energies are focused on a very different project, fronted by his old friend and Ween covers band cohort Marc Gartman.
After a year’s gestation in Duluth, Minnesota, jamming and recording in Sparhawk’s homein Flaming Lips style, inspired by the selfless devotion of the nanny who hangs herself in declaring, “Damien, it’s all for you”. The macabre undercurrent continues thoughout their first album , half an hour of psychedelic house, electronic funk, Afro-Cuban rhythms and Mario Kart electronics retelling a Japanese fable that Gartman’s father would read him as a child: a boy is cast out of his town for his obsessive love of drawing cats, only to find himself lost in an abandoned church, hiding in a closet. “In the night he hears horrible screaming and ravaging of flesh,” Gartman explains with relish. “He wakes up in the morning and finds that the cats that he drew have come to life and saved him from a giant goblin rat. It always kinda kept with me.”
