White Roses, My God is unlike anything Alan Sparhawk has put out before. At this point in the indie rock veteran’s career, though, that’s something to be expected: following its formation in Duluth, Minnesota in 1993, his band Low may have emerged as progenitors of the slowcore movement, but it went on to gain as strong of a reputation for maturing and constantly mutating – and, with 2018’s Double Negative and 2021’s HEY WHAT, totally reinventing – its sound. Sparhawk’s new album – and first since the death, in 2022, of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker – doesn’t revert back to the minimalist, elegiac style the group helped pioneer, at least not in any traditional sense. But it is, in the experimental fashion embraced by their last couple of albums, minimalist and elegiac, at once teasing, fracturing, and stumbling upon emotions through the means of vocal manipulation and technological rigidity. Rather than quietly continuing Low’s latest evolution, it sounds more like him rediscovering and shrouding it in all his own voice.
The album was home-recorded and partly improvised using cheap equipment initially set up for Sparhawk’s children, but it wasn’t an entirely solitary effort. His and Parker’s son, Cyrus, plays bass on a few songs, and their daughter, Hollis, sings – to obviously uncanny effect – backing vocals. While Low’s last album bore the mark of their primary collaborator, the enigmatic, genre-melting producer BJ Burton, White Roses, My God finds Sparhawk working with Nat Harvie, who also straddled pop sensibilities while tackling heavy subject matter on their latest album, New Virginity, which featured Sparhawk. Though leaving plenty of space for the musician, Harvie is attuned not only to the sensitivity and grief seeping through the tough edges of White Roses, My God, but the ways it interjects with the creative process. “Can’t you see how hard I’m working at this,” Harvie sang alongside Merce Lemon on New Virginity‘s beatific closer, probing the listener as much as the thing that carries this to them, and “you” holds a similar multiplicity when Sparhawk pleads, “Can you help me feel something here?” But you can’t help but hear the strain through the vocal filter, as if any amount of repetition or variation of the line could unhollow its core.
Elsewhere on the record, though, there’s proof that the music does help. In fact, the very next song, ‘Station’, coils around a clear (though still eerily delivered) affirmation – “I can please myself with the little things I surround myself with” – even if the words wrangle themselves out of shape as synths stab and balloon. For both Sparhawk and the listener, the use of a pitch-shifter and preset synthesizer presents a barrier as much as the opening of expressive possibilities, depending on how far he’s willing to stretch its limits: songs like ‘Not the 1’ and ‘Blackwater’ are inscrutable even with the lyric sheet in front of you, while others lay his longing bare: “It’s a lonely place if you’re alone,” he sings on ‘Heaven’, “I wanna be there with the people that I love.” At just over a minute, it’s the shortest track on the album, as if the thought alone is a cross to bear, or because nothing could possibly resolve its final question: “Are you gonna be there?” ‘Brother’, meanwhile, is vulnerable yet elusive in its yearning, allowing light and even a sliver of rock n’ roll to trickle down its tight, claustrophobic structure.
Sparhawk’s loneliness, at times poetically impenetrable and others heart-wrenching, is of course obscured by the fact that he hardly sounds like himself (and is occasionally backed by other singers). But it also feels transcended, however briefly or supernaturally, by its alignment with Parker’s unique cadence, which is the other astounding thing about ‘Heaven’: just how closely the voices come together to sound like one. Even when Sparhawk’s vocals approach a kind of robotic ecstasy on ‘Can U Hear’, it’s impossible to tune out the ethereal hum hovering just beneath the surface, a foil to its pounding, visceral beat.
It’s not only the grief that separates White Roses, My God from similarly daring releases like Kim Gordon’s The Collective, but its oddly playful, even rudimentary approach. “Do you want a big thrill?” is the first question Sparhawk shoots at us, and though songs like ‘I Made This Beat’ and ‘Somebody Else’s Room’ home in on that sense of excitement, the record is more about finding ways to fill the gap between desire and its fulfillment, knowing it’s there no matter how simple or childlike the desire seems. At the very end, Sparhawk’s language turns biting as he sings lines like, “I know the ghost and the ages of water/ I draw the claws and I a bid and I barter.” It sounds like he’s (literally) warbling nonsense, until his voice cracks through every layer of artifice: “And I have prayed for what you weave/ I have wanted to wake you with everything I could be then.” The praying is eternal, Sparhawk suggests, the wanting not quite a thing of the past: whether we wait or run or battle, it just keeps going.
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