Alan Sparhawk – White Roses, My God
★★★☆
Released September 27th, 2024 on Sub Pop Records
Bob Dylan once told us that “death is not the end”, but there sure is a ring of utter finality to it. When Mimi Parker died of ovarian cancer in 2022, it was certainly the end of Low, the legendary slowcore band she’d played in with her husband Alan Sparhawk since 1993. How could it not be? The great truth of death, though, is that the living carry on in its wake. They cannot remain static, because human life by its very nature is dynamic. So while Low is gone, Alan Sparhawk is still here, making music.
Continuing on in the same vein of Low would likely have felt unnatural, though. Mimi Parker was such an integral part of the duo’s sound that any attempt to replicate it would probably have felt like cheap imitation at best, blasphemy at worst. That’s not a casual use of that word, either; Sparhawk explained the title of White Roses, My God to Consequence of Sound as “Mimi loved roses, and sometimes I think she is God.” So what to do? In this case, Sparhawk chose an alternate route, one that takes him through the soundscapes of downtempo electronica, industrial, and hyperpop. It’s a bit jarring at first, but it becomes familiar after a while by dint of the songwriting. The last few Low records were marked by experimentations with distortion, and there are similar motifs going on throughout White Roses, My God.
The most obvious differentiation between this record and what has come before are the vocals. The duo’s vocals on Low records were hushed, reverential. Here, Sparhawk recorded all of his vocals through a vocoder, playing with them until they are barely recognizable as human. These pair well with the distorted synthesizer sounds that form the backbone of the songs. Sparhawk examines grief obliquely, through a mask of the artificial. It’s too raw to confront on its own terms, you can’t look at it directly, you have to trick it. From reading across various mediums, this seems to be too much for a subset of longtime Low listeners. There’s the usual nonsense: electronics aren’t ‘real’, vocoders aren’t ‘natural’, it’s ‘giving Brat‘ too much. The latter is how you know someone doesn’t know their ass from their elbow, of course, but going in this direction was always going to open Sparhawk up to these sort of backlashes. It’s an excellent example of how electronics can be used to convey emotional ideas – that’s the funniest part of people’s distaste for the sound here. It’s layered meaning, which is often anathema to modern listening audiences.
As an exercise in moving on, however much ‘moving on’ can be a description, White Roses, My God hits the mark squarely. It’s probably not a listening experience that will be repeated often, but it’s a fascinating one for all of that.
