Review: Duluth music heroes treat St. Paul to rare pairing

It was one of the biggest nights ever for the Duluth music scene, and it took place in St. Paul.

That go-figure element was one of several quirks behind Thursday night’s pairing of Low’s Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles at the Fitzgerald Theater.

Other ways the sold-out twofer performance seemed a tad askew: Trampled is the bigger draw of the two names, and yet it got relegated to backing-band status at the show. Also, what’s an acoustic, bluegrass-inspired string group even doing playing with a fully electrified indie-rocker in the first place?

In the end, though, the one and only officially co-billed pairing of the two giants of the Duluth scene in their native state felt so perfectly put-together and musically coherent, the only thing that did seem off is the fact that they are not playing more shows together here.

The 90-minute performance was built around Sparhawk’s latest album for famed grunge label Sub Pop Records, “With Trampled by Turtles.” He leaned on his longtime cohorts to make the record while still coming out of the Lake Superior-thick fog of losing his wife and bandmate, Mimi Parker, to cancer in late 2022. It’s not overtly about the tragedy, but the LP is rife with those emotions.

As friends are prone to successfully do, Trampled brought some lighthearted elements to the heavy tone of Thursday’s concert.

When Sparhawk asked his pickup band to play the right note to help him tune his guitar, for instance, all six members played completely different notes in sour unison. And when the rocker and the string pickers churned out a particularly dramatic and breathtaking version of Low’s 2005 classic “When I Go Deaf” — ironically a song about words being overrated — Trampled singer/guitarist Dave Simonett found the perfectly bright way to sum it up.

The “With Trampled” songs weren’t played in the same order as on the record, but all nine of them were played together — and quite cohesively — in the first half of the concert.

Highlights included “Screaming Song” and “Don’t Take Your Light,” songs that utilized the Trampled crew’s string-arrangement prowess to generate the kind of desperate urgency heard in many of Sparhawk’s Low tunes. Also: “Heaven” and “Too High,” more melodic tunes where Trampled’s well-gelled vocal harmonies generated the kind of harrowing beauty Sparhawk created singing with Parker.

Not just for emotional reasons, the most beautiful singing of the night came when Parker’s and Sparhawk’s daughter Hollis Sparhawk walked out to sing the healing refrain in “Not Broken,” also heard on the new record. The mid-20s music scion then stuck around to sing/nail “Just Like Christmas,” rekindling the warm glow her mother’s voice brought to the underground holiday classic from Low’s sleeper-hit 1999 “Christmas” album. See what I mean about things getting emotional?

“When I Go Deaf” and three more Low songs followed, Silver Rider,” “Holy Ghost” and “Days Like These,” each heavily laced with Trampled’s imprint and yet still true to the original. Sparhawk saved the latter tune for the encore and dedicated it to “Satan’s baby” (“‘Southpark’ fans will get the reference,” he explained).

A similar days-like-these tone permeated the one new song dropped in at show’s end, a rather simple and folky ditty titled “No More Darkness.” Its lyrics didn’t really need explanation.