Auto-Tune has many uses, not least as kneejerk hip-hop and R&B standby. At their heart, all vocal effects make the familiar different – which feels like the point on what’s billed as Alan Sparhawk’s debut solo album. For 30 years, Sparhawk was half of the slowcore band Low, whose latter years found them, and Sparhawk’s various side projects, experimenting with processed new sounds.
Following the loss of his Low bandmate and wife Mimi Parker to cancer in 2022, Sparhawk has penned a set of skeletal digital songs with his old voice distorted; it’s described as “a hyperpop record about grief”. Full of brutal repetition and bittersweet electronics, it’s both highly strung and unexpectedly playful. “I made this beat,” Sparhawk chants on the club-adjacent track of the same name, an act of defiant creation. “I made it.” Sparhawk’s son Cyrus plays bass, his daughter Hollis supplies backing vocals.
Established artists have passed this vocodered way before – Bon Iver and Kanye West in recent decades, Neil Young and Cher passim – but Sparhawk’s take feels up to the minute. This is a record that is sometimes hard to hear, and not just because of Sparhawk’s stylistic volte-face. Hollis’s delicate, Parker-esque backing vocals hit like a truck on Heaven.
