Album Review: White Roses, My God by Alan Sparhawk

The earliest version of Low featured the kind of gradually constructed minimalist elegies that encouraged your heart to swell in joy or sorrow. Over time, that sound matured and evolved to take on so many extra tones, colours and emotions. Low's last two albums were also their most experimental, surrounding Sparkhawk and Parker's vocal harmonies with electronic processing and distorted noise.

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Parallel to Low's evolving, often inspired musical career, frontman Alan Sparhawk invested in musical ventures as diverse as a funk quartet and a New Wave synth band. Following the death of his wife, and Low bandmate, Mimi Parker, White Roses, My God sees Sparhawk alone at the controls for the first time since Solo Guitar, his beautiful, experimental ambient album of 2006. He takes the opportunity to make a record both unique and startling, even for an artist with so many arrows in his quiver.

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Backed by a small, rootsy band, the Duluth, Minnesota-based guitarist singer and songwriter unveiled a sequence of raw, viscerally emotional songs that seemed to translate unfathomable loss (Mimi Parker, Sparhawk's wife and other half in revered US indie-rock institution Low for three decades, passed away from cancer in 2022) into startlingly vulnerable bruised beauty, stored for posterity on Youtube video clips. White Roses, My God features none of that road-tested material. Fractured, murky and not infrequently pitched halfway between alluringly resonant and frustratingly evasive, Sparhawk's second also (if 2006's improvisational instrumental curio Solo Guitar is counted), takes the reinvention via electronic dissonance and vocal effects that characterised Low's masterful final run of albums (culminating in 2021's Hey What) to its daring and expectation-defying conclusion by ditching conventional 'rock' instruments almost entirely in favour of subterranean beats and robotic electronic soundscapes.

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How do you make sense of the unanswered questions and all-engulfing sadness that comes with losing someone? What do you do when everything feels like it's disintegrating? How do you navigate the aching numbness that grief brings? White Roses, My God is Alan Sparhawk's answer: a record borne of grief for the loss of his wife, Mimi Parker - both his partner and creative collaborator. Together, over thirty years, they created the hushed, strange beauty of Low until she passed away in 2022. Made by Sparhawk entirely on his own, White Roses is the sound of someone searching for his voice, a new way to articulate the love they shared and all that is missed.

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For years people have wondered what an Alan Sparhawk solo album would sound like. When Low, his band since 1993, retired due to the passing of Mimi Parker, his bandmate and wife , in 2022 talk was rife as to whether Sparhawk would record again or pass into music folklore. During 2023 he recorded with friends and family on the electro-pop project Damien and the funk band DRECHO Rhythm Section .

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Alan Sparhawk's White Roses, My God resists easy interpretation. That's due, in no small part, to the fact that the former Low singer-guitarist filters every note that he sings through Auto-Tune, making it difficult to decipher most of what he's saying and, in a nod to Prince's Camille alter ego, lending an ambiguity of gender and age to his voice. Composed of tracks that felt more like transformative remixes of existing songs, Low's 2018 album Double Negative stretched the boundaries of rock, and Sparhawk's solo debut further departs from the conventions of the genre.

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