At Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht last November, Alan Sparhawk performed in a church to a congregation that was clearly there to pay its respects. It was the Low guitarist and singer’s first European show since the passing of his wife and lifelong bandmate, Mimi Parker, just a year and six days earlier; the Minnesota band had been booked to play the Dutch festival in November 2022, until her worsening ovarian cancer forced the cancellation of their remaining tour dates. At the Jacobikerk, the pews spilled over as Sparhawk and a band including his son, Cyrus, performed loose but raging rockers that were piercingly direct in their invocation of Parker’s death, panic attacks, the limits of hope, and the damnation that might as well follow.
I have never been to a show where the audience was so clearly on the same emotional wavelength—nearly all of us crying audibly, for Sparhawk and for the tangible loss of a stalwart, often holy-sounding voice that had likely guided many present for some part of the preceding three decades. I wondered how it must feel for Sparhawk to be confronted by this outpouring, which felt like an understandable response to the intimacy of Low’s music and public persona, as two beloved artists who were also models for long-term romantic and creative partnership. It seemed at the same time that our unearned catharsis could be almost a burden pressed upon him—one intense hour paling in comparison to a new and unwanted life of dislocation.
Indie rock has been struck by a devastation of comparable records in recent years: Sufjan Stevens, Nick Cave, and Phil Elverum have all stared unflinchingly at bereavement in its transcendent awfulness, shocking mundanity, and gradual revelation. But for whatever reason, Sparhawk chose not to make those raw, extraordinary new songs part of his first solo album following the conclusion of Low, which he has said could only ever be him and Parker. White Roses, My God is more primordial than that. It contains his earliest complete attempts at self-expression after her passing, using basic electronic equipment, originally purchased for Cyrus and his older sister, Hollis, to find a new voice and with it go beyond language. “Sometimes, something would come out that I could not stop and I could not mess with,” he told The Guardian.
There is a sense in which White Roses, My God is shocking. Its sound is blown out, staticky, inhuman, like Kanye at his most desolate and grasping or SoundCloud rap at its blurriest. Giddy and distorted and impish, like 100 gecs’ wacko tricksiness. Trappy and disjointed and possessed of some feverish, questing energy beyond listeners’ full comprehension, like Kim Gordon’s solo albums, also made after a huge midlife rupture. Sparhawk’s voice is always mutated by a Helicon VoiceTone pedal, rendering him a goblin droid capable of sounding unsettlingly menacing and just as unsettlingly innocent, and rarely coherent. The album sounds nothing like Low, and certainly nothing like the received wisdom of how a record about the loss of one’s life partner should sound, with scarcely any bare-all lyrics akin to what Sparhawk sang in Utrecht.
But then when did Low ever conform to the expected? Sparhawk and Parker greeted the birth of Hollis with “In Metal,” from 2001’s Things We Lost in the Fire, in which they longed to keep her “little body in metal” so that she might remain forever unspoiled and protected: not a sentiment you’re about to find on a new-baby greeting card. It is strange to look back just over a decade ago, to the bafflement and near-indignation that met the band’s 27-minute “drone not drones” set at Minneapolis festival Rock the Garden in 2013, which they later explained was a protest at the Obama administration’s “targeted killings” in the Middle East. Where fans might have craved their benedictions in the violence of the Trump era, Low instead met it with furious distortion on 2018’s Double Negative, and doubled down on 2021’s HEY WHAT, the mutant noise perhaps also evoking a more personal kind of malignancy.
You could hear Sparhawk’s machine music as an embodiment of the way loss can make its bearers feel abject and monstrous, caught between the living and the dead, but his evident trust in the freedom that these tools offered him feels more like spiritual necessity. It feels akin to André 3000’s New Blue Sun, some kind of hopeful venture beyond definition and into a new frontier of possibility; or simply rising to meet the disorienting intensity of a moment, as Low always did. He told the New York Times that it was Parker’s voice that completed a song; you could imagine how not sounding like himself stepped in for that kind of externalized green light. The only palpable note of defiance is “I Made This Beat.” The mutated Sparhawk repeats the title over and over, at first burbling, then blaring and stuttering, the drily thrumming synths and ticklish percussion growing closer and more aggressive. The phrase evolves from the literal surprise at having finished a song to a kind of godlike fervor at having resuscitated the inanimate.
White Roses, My God often sounds rudimentary, seemingly happy to dwell in presets (the credits simply cite “synths”). It’s far from the formal reinventions of Low’s final two albums made with producer BJ Burton, but it is viscerally inventive within its closed sound world: snaking, slurred, and often anarchically fun. There are a few would-be pop songs here with their own gripping dramatic arcs: “Get Still” is woozy and lurching, the sudden divine blasts of Sparhawk’s voice and Hollis’s wordless call (and how uncannily she sounds like Parker) breaking open the song and funneling the slurred instrumentation towards sharper definition. “Can U Hear” trades in darker textures, a glitching wind battering a harsh, grinding motif, Sparhawk’s language so crushed by distortion that it becomes just another rasping texture before it breaks free to wail across the abyss. “Brother” is the only song to feature Sparhawk’s guitar, a rare moment of familiarity: here a clenched, repeating figure dappled with flickering light, then eventually cracking open as Sparhawk and Hollis, Nona Invie, and Leah Sanderson sing a chorus that crests and slumps: “Watch and wait.”
It’s one of few comprehensible lyrics. The record comes, surprisingly, with liner notes that reveal what Sparhawk is singing, though given how obscured most of his words are within the music—he’s said most of them were free-associative—it feels academic to parse them too closely. There are flashes of the gospel, Jesus and the Devil; blood, bait, and carrion. Most frequently, he’s suspicious of idealism and saviors, fact-agnostic propagandists, anyone afraid of “the pause that’s hidden and raw,” a line he rolls around his mouth like a marble on “Not the 1.” “Black Water” is a footworky hurtle with a subtly sleazy, almost Nine Inch Nails-worthy motif; here Sparhawk urges, “Let not hate and fame set the clock,” and also slips out: “I’m not the face that make sad.” Whether his theme is grief or something more outward looking, he’s clearly resistant to the convenience of preordained roles or glib narratives in lieu of sitting with difficult truths.
The clearest and most coherent parts of White Roses, My God are the more fragmentary, mantra-like songs, in which Sparhawk reaches towards the unknown—and which also seem to be the parts most closely aligned with Parker. “Heaven,” he sings on a beautiful, scrap-like song of the same name, is “a lonely place if you’re alone.” His daughter’s wordless voice swoops around a juddering, fizzing beat as he asks: “Are you gonna be there?” “Feel Something” comes off like the opposite of “I Made This Beat,” desperately searching for sensation amid numbness: “Can you feel something here?” Sparhawk asks a dozen different ways, his voice plaintive, fragmenting, lonely, ultimately so tightly compressed it almost squelches as he palpates for an emotional spark. There’s something almost carnal and funky to the bounding keys that’s a gutting contrast to the robotic, desperate vocals.
In the wake of Parker’s death, Sparhawk has not only made this album and the songs he premiered at Le Guess Who?; he’s also formed the funk band Damien, with his son; another funk outfit called Derecho Rhythm Section, which features both his kids; the Neil Young covers act Tired Eyes; and the noise-rock band Feast of Lanterns. Next year he’s releasing a collaborative album with Duluth bluegrass group Trampled by Turtles; he plays on the new Father John Misty record. He’s everywhere from refined concert halls to neighborhood bars. Anywhere might become a church, a diffusion of spirit that might connect; the momentum keeps that spirit alive.
His relentlessly propulsive new album only ever pauses for breath once, on closing song “Project 4 Ever,” another that seems to hold Parker in its groovy, cosmic boy-band weirdness. (“I have wanted to wake you with everything I could be then,” he warbles.) The tension of the record breaks, and a vast, sparkling deluge floods the song. It’s beautiful and subsuming, resonating with the lure of the void—how easy it would be to give in to pain and darkness. Then it tapers to a static echo, and Sparhawk’s voice returns, urging forward motion: “On and on and on and on.” White Roses, My God won’t be for all Low fans, and though—perhaps as with the strangely comparable posthumous SOPHIE album—its reception will certainly be softened by goodwill, it stands alone. Sparhawk releasing a record this immediate and inchoate feels like a gesture of faith, in both listeners’ patience and the musical futures it might yet bloom.
