Meet Omen-inspired electronic funk quartet Damien, featuring Low’s Alan Sparhawk and his son Cyrus, in our JULY 2023 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.
“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 home studio, Damien emerged in March with a self-titled debut single – a dream-pop love song in Flaming Lips style, inspired by the selfless devotion of the nanny who hangs herself in The Omen declaring, “Damien, it’s all for you”. The macabre undercurrent continues thoughout their first album The Boy Who Drew Cats, 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…
