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. More drastically, the vocals are so thoroughly mutated by shape-shifting electronic effects that the otherworldly voice emerging from the electronics often seems more likely to belong to some haunted digital ghost than Sparhawk.
Sparhawk isn’t the first renowned musician to respond to personal tragedy, grief and upheaval with a radical reinvention. Neil Young’s misunderstood Trans (1982) employed vocoders to deliberately disguise Young’s voice (and the deeply personal subject matter) on a suite of songs inspired by the stress and heartbreak of trying to find a way to help a severely disabled child communicate. Recorded after the accidental death of Cave’s son, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree (2016) found the band’s usual swagger exchanged for abstract and austere atmospherics that were more in tune with the grief-stricken proceedings.
Sparhawk isn’t content with merely messing with the sound of his voice or the nature of the presentation: White Roses, My God
also toys with the notion of what constitutes a ‘song’. Sparhawk (who
reportedly has another, more conventional album recorded with Trampled
by Turtles ready to go) has explained that these tracks emerged
spontaneously from his home studio experimentations with electronic
equipment he wasn’t very familiar with. The excitement of mastering the
textural possibilities of new tools is evident in the driving, intense
“I Made This Beat” (which finds Sparhawk repeating the title line
incessantly), but the mood of White Roses, My God is generally
darker and murkier, even foreboding, as on the claustrophobic, nocturnal
rattle and holler of excellent, unsettling first single “Can U Hear”
and the skittery unease of “Brother” (which features the album’s
solitary blasts of guitar). Elsewhere, an impression of sketchy
extemporization can become more prominent, with tracks like the
soul-hued closer “Project 4 Eva” rising from the murk with glimpses of
startling beauty that are never quite fully realised, and the pained
mantra of “Feel Something” staying afloat due to the expressive power of
Sparkhawk’s powerfully intense vocals that no amount of disfiguring
electronic manipulation can blunt.
It’s possibly telling that the album’s one diversion into a
classic strong structure, the quite literally heavenly, backing
vocal-enriched digital gospel of “Heaven”, sputters to a halt after one
minute. The undisguised loss and longing glimpsed in lines like
‘’heaven, it’s a lonely place when you’re alone’’ (the effects-laden
vocals for once clearly decipherable) is perhaps too nakedly personal
and uncomfortably raw to sustain across an entire album. White Roses, My God
is an often compelling experiment, but it’s hard not to suspect that
its bold, often inscrutable excursions into alien territory ultimately
undersell Sparhawk’s immense gifts as a musical communicator.
