Alan Sparhawk With Trampled By Turtles

Critic's Take

On With Trampled By Turtles Alan Sparhawk finds a wary grace, and the review leans toward highlighting the quieter high points rather than big, immediate hooks. The critic privileges the album’s intimate moments - songs like “Stranger” and “Heaven” are framed as the record’s most affecting tracks, where Sparhawk’s voice and the subtle arrangements register strongest. There is a recurring note about tension beneath calm that makes the best tracks on With Trampled By Turtles feel lived-in and slowly revealing. The reviewer’s tone is measured and attentive, guiding readers toward the album’s understated best songs rather than headline moments.

Key Points

• The review singles out intimate, tension-filled songs like "Stranger" and "Heaven" as the album's best for emotional subtlety.
• The album's core strength is its quiet, lived-in intimacy and the soft tension that runs beneath ordinary arrangements.

Themes

Critic's Take

Alan Sparhawk arrives on With Trampled By Turtles with songs that find their strongest footing in sorrow, especially “Screaming Song” and “Not Broken”. The reviewer’s voice lingers on how the record’s grief-drenched center - from the weeping fiddle of “Screaming Song” to the sparse defiance of “Not Broken” - makes those the best songs on the album. Elsewhere, songs like “Stranger” and “Get Still” feel dated or slightly corny, which undercuts the record’s unevenness. Ultimately the album rings out loudly as a testament to love enduring after loss, even if it does not fully convert this particular critic into a believer in Low-style beauty.

Key Points

• The best song, “Screaming Song”, is the record’s raw emotional apex, driven by weeping fiddle and direct grief.
• The album’s core strength is its honest grappling with loss and family, which gives several songs vivid emotional power despite uneven songwriting.

Themes

Critic's Take

The ache at the center of With Trampled By Turtles is relentless and intimate, and Alan Sparhawk channels it through songs like “Screaming Song” and “Don’t Take Your Light”. The album pairs Sparhawk’s somber elegance with Trampled By Turtles’ rustic backdrop, producing moments of real transcendence - most notably the album centerpiece “Screaming Song”, which visits a kind of harrowing catharsis. Sparse, vulnerable tracks such as “Don’t Take Your Light” read like Americana standards in the making, while family ties on “Not Broken” add a sting of uncanny poignancy. Overall, the best songs on the album earn their power from plainspoken grief and carefully escalating instrumentation that refuses easy consolation.

Key Points

• “Screaming Song” is the emotional centerpiece, delivering the album’s most potent articulation of grief.
• The album’s core strengths are Sparhawk’s somber vocal presence and Trampled By Turtles’ rustic arrangements that frame intimate reflections on mortality.

Themes

Critic's Take

Alan Sparhawk finds unexpected solace in With Trampled By Turtles, and the best songs on the record - most notably “Screaming Song” and “Don’t Take Your Light” - show him at his most naked and exacting. The reviewer's voice lingers on how the band’s harmonies make his plain, oaken singing feel like a communal brace, and why “Screaming Song” functions as the album’s aching centerpiece. There is a steady empathy throughout, so searching lines and old-time instrumental swells make these tracks the clearest answers to what are the best songs on With Trampled By Turtles.

Key Points

• “Screaming Song” is the album’s emotional centerpiece, where Sparhawk’s grief becomes communal and immediate.
• The album’s core strengths are its plain, supportive harmonies and unadorned vocals that render grief into clear, exacting songs.

Themes

Critic's Take

There is something irresistible about Alan Sparhawk partnering with Trampled by Turtles on With Trampled By Turtles, and the best songs - notably “Screaming Song” and “Not Broken” - show why. The reviewer leans into evocative comparison, calling the fiddle on “Screaming Song” cathartic rather than torturous, and notes the familial layer on “Not Broken” when Sparhawk’s daughter joins. He also flags transformed versions of “Heaven” and “Get Still” as interesting contrasts to their originals. Overall the tone is appreciative of the Americana warmth even as he registers disappointment at the retreat from the pop experimentation of the prior album.

Key Points

• The best song is "Screaming Song" because its fiddle and drone rhythm create a cathartic, goosebump-inducing peak.
• The album’s core strengths are its Americana warmth, the effective collaboration with Trampled by Turtles, and moments that echo Low’s familiar sound.

Themes

Critic's Take

Casey Epstein-Gross watches Alan Sparhawk unmask himself on With Trampled By Turtles, and the best songs - especially “Screaming Song”, “Too High” and “Stranger” - are where his grief is most naked and necessary. The reviewer’s language is intimate and observant, noting how “Too High” detonates with context and how lead single “Stranger” turns mundane errands into tactile proof of survival. There is a constant throughline: collaboration with Trampled by Turtles transforms pain into accompaniment, making these tracks feel communal more than solitary. The result is songs that do not fix loss but make it hum in tune, the album’s clearest strength and its most haunting reward.

Key Points

• “Screaming Song” is the album’s emotional centerpiece because of its raw honesty and powerful depiction of grief.
• The album’s core strength is communal accompaniment, transforming solitary mourning into shared, survivable music.

Themes

Critic's Take

Alan Sparhawk's With Trampled By Turtles resettles him in plain sight, and the best songs on the record - notably “Not Broken” and “Don’t Take Your Light” - are the ones that wrench and console at once. Janne Oinonen writes with a warm, observant gravity, noting how “Heaven” and “The Screaming Song” are recalibrated here from electronic bruises into raw, communal feeling. The reviewese balances elegiac weight with small moments of shared joy, arguing that the album's looseness and first-take immediacy let these standout tracks breathe and land with real emotional force. This is an album where the best tracks reveal Sparhawk's voice returning, unmasked and uncompromising, making them the clear answers to queries about the best songs on With Trampled By Turtles.

Key Points

• “Not Broken” is best for its cello-led arrangement, Sparhawk’s powerful vocals and the poignant duet with his daughter.
• The album’s core strengths are its raw emotional directness, communal spontaneity and rootsy acoustic textures.

Themes

Critic's Take

Alan Sparhawk arrives on With Trampled By Turtles with a wounded, resilient voice and intimate arrangements that make the best songs — especially “Not Broken” and “Screaming Song” — land hard. The record trades the electronic stutters of White Roses, My God for choral voices, plangent strings and rustic immediacy, so the best tracks on With Trampled By Turtles feel like bedside consolations and firm statements at once. Sparhawk’s phrasing is spare and immediate, and on “Not Broken” the harmonies are devastatingly echoic of Mimi Parker, which is where the album’s emotional center sits. The interplay with Trampled By Turtles keeps the music lived-in and conversational rather than showy, making the best songs here quietly explosive in their honesty.

Key Points

• “Not Broken” is best because its harmonies evoke Mimi Parker and deliver a devastating emotional center.
• The album’s core strength is intimate collaboration that translates grief into restrained, immediate folk arrangements.

Themes

Critic's Take

John Mulvey finds the best songs on With Trampled By Turtles to be those that transmute private grief into communal strength, notably “Screaming Song” and “Heaven”. Mulvey writes in his measured, elegiac tone that “Screaming Song” is the album's heartbreaking centrepiece, its fiddle providing abrasive counterpoint to the plea, while “Heaven” is reimagined here as rousing rather than provisional. He frames the record as the sonic opposite of Sparhawk's solitary White Roses, My God - an all-acoustic day-long session where Trampled By Turtles become his Stray Gators, teasing out folk resonances and collective solace. The result, in Mulvey's voice, is a tough but moving record where community-making redeems sorrow and certain tracks stand out as small cathartic miracles.

Key Points

• Screaming Song is best because its fiddle-driven counterpoint and vocal plea make it the emotional centrepiece.
• The album's core strength is transforming solitary grief into communal solace through acoustic collaboration.

Themes