I really want to like this album more than I do.

Some necessary context: When I reviewed Low‘s final album HEY WHAT for this very site three full years ago in September of 2021, I had no inkling that their last album would turn out to be their last album. It was just so expansive, so gorgeous, a bold new reinvention in a career replete with them! They clearly had so much more left to do and say. Indeed, part of what made Mimi Parker’s passing from ovarian cancer in November 2022 such a gut punch, was that Low was the ultra-rare band to only become more daring, more innovative, more radical as they aged. Rather than just coasting by Rolling Stones-style on past formulas and decades-old accomplishments as almost all bands inevitably do, they were still exploring and expanding the limits of their sound to the very end. They were Eternal Progression personified.

But now the dead have been buried, and the focus shifts back to the living; and the open question among Low fans became what would Alan Sparhawk—that most melancholy of musicians, whose mental health was always precarious even when he did have a loving wife by his side^[1]He had to cancel tour dates in 2005 after suffering a psychotic break so severe he began to think he was the anti-Christ, recall.—do now. This question became especially fraught for me personally, because I myself had to hospitalize a close loved one for post-partum psychosis just this last August, for the third time in four years. That is, I have learned repeatedly just how important it is to have a loving spouse there to help ground one back to reality during the long road to recovery–which support is precisely what Sparhawk had lost with Parker’s passing. I awaited his next album anxiously, in every sense of the word.

So what has Sparhawk been doing these past two years? So far, he has been stubbornly defying expectations at every turn as to what sort of music he should be recording right now. When we last checked in on Sparhawk earlier this year, we found him experimenting not with such funereal genres as, say, Slow-Core, or Blues, or even Punk, but with Funk, of all things. I initially found this an odd direction, till I reflected that playing Funk and being in a Funk share common etymological roots; like Dixieland over a century ago, Funk is a funeral as celebration and celebration as funeral, and hence eminently apropos for the grieving process. Moreover, at music festivals across the globe, he had also been debuting more traditional Rock songs like “Don’t Take Your Light Out Of Me“, “JCMF,”^[2]Short for “Jesus Christ Mother F*cker,” wherein Sparhawk, like a true Latter-day Saint, declares in angry Jeremiad that when Christ comes again you are “all gonna pay,” that … Continue reading and “Screaming Song“^[3]The long-awaited sequel to Low’s “When I Go Deaf” we didn’t know we needed., that each sounded custom-built for an absolutely shattering album of mourning and grief that I was sure was forthcoming.^[4]Seriously, just go download this live bootleg here, it sounds much closer to the sort of album I think we were all actually hoping for.

What was my surprise then (and likely everyone’s), when lead-single “Can U Hear” debuted in late-July, and it swiftly became clear that none of the Funk and Rock songs he had been debuting live would feature on his new solo album, the stunningly-titled White Roses, My God. All these passionate songs of mourning that had been reducing audiences to tears world-wide are apparently intended for another solo album^[5]At least per the New York Times to be recorded next year with fellow Minnesotans Trampled By Turtles^[6]Or at least, so I hope at this point!. But for White Roses, My God, Sparhawk took a hard left turn and did something completely different; he has instead^[7]At least per SubPop‘s marketing materials. taken cues from that other fellow Minnesotan Prince (particularly his lost 1986 album Camille), as well as his Canadian neighbor Neil Young (particularly his divisive 1983 album Trans), by using a vocoder to electronically manipulate his voice.

Back in July, I speculated that Sparhawk’s vocal self-effacement was in fact part of his whole grieving process. TS Eliot once argued that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”^[8]From TS Eliot’s hyper-influential 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Sparhawk, too, was by all appearances seeking to escape his personality and emotions,^[9]Notably, he pulled the same stunt on his only other solo album to date, 2006’s Solo Guitar, which is strictly an ambient noise-rock instrumental. Sparhawk apparently only likes to express himself … Continue reading especially in the aftermath of his profoundest grief.^[10]Incidentally, the album also dropped only a day after the anniversary of my own mother’s passing.

Yet whether intended to or not, this album most certainly poses a challenge (likely even a disappointment) to anyone who simply wanted to grieve with Sparhawk over Parker’s passing—to “mourn with those that mourn”, as per our most sacred baptismal covenants. Those hoping to, at a bare minimum, just hear the unfiltered ache in Sparhawk’s voice, will be frustrated at every turn. Not coincidentally, the current top rated YouTube comment for the “Can U Hear” video is, “I am not going to lie, I long to hear your voice again, even a whisper would have moved me;” and though the album itself has been well reviewed by critics, that comment appears to be the predominant response among fans so far.

Come to think of it, perhaps that’s precisely why Sparhawk recorded this album instead: to make sure no one else could intrude upon nor appropriate his grief, and thus keep it private for himself. In literary terms, fans were perhaps hoping for something like Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” but instead were given TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, a poem that still frustrates readers over a hundred years later. Even Low made occasional concessions to mainstream appeal^[11]e.g. performing “California” on Carson Daly; covering “Stay” by Rihanna; licensing a Christmas song to a GAP commercial; recording “Half Light” for The Mothman Prophecies soundtrack; … Continue reading; White Roses, My God by contrast makes no such concessions even to his own fans. In a sense, Sparhawk did record a Punk album after all, in how he has willfully antagonized his own audience at every turn.

I am tempted to say that one should perhaps approach this short album^[12]Barely more than a half-hour long, which would only be an EP if it were a Low record. strictly on its own terms, without thinking of the long history of Low or Mimi Parker at all, as though it really were the solo debut from some unknown new artist. But that simply won’t fly either, because Sparhawk has already said on social media that the album title is a direct allusion to Parker: “Mim loved roses, and sometimes I think she is God”. For better or worse, this is indeed the album that Sparhawk intended as his first, big statement of grief after the loss of his wife, and can scarcely be read any other way.

If one squints, one can make the argument that White Roses fits in musically with the trajectory of Low’s final trilogy of albums–Ones and Sixes, Double Negative, and HEY WHAT–in continuing down the rabbit-hole of electronica and digital self-effacement. Perhaps this style of electronica is even an homage to the sort of music he might’ve been making with his wife if she were still here^[13]Even if it’s borderline impossible to imagine Mimi Parker’s voice getting filtered through a Vocoder too.. Maybe she is.

Which, as a sidebar, brings me to the other open question here, of what this record would reveal about the state of Sparhawk’s spirituality in the aftermath of his profoundest grief. A life-long member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Sparhawk has very noticeably not been wearing a shirt–or more to the point, any sort of undergarment–in the promo-shots for White Roses^[14]Including on both the album cover and the video for “Can U Hear”. While I have long ceased equating garment-wearing with personal righteousness, I am nevertheless keenly aware that it remains a fairly reliable indicator of one’s relationship with the faith’s most sacred rituals.

I will not even attempt to speculate on his or any other person’s relationship with their God here (nor should you); but I will note that on the very brief fifth track “Heaven,” he sings that heaven is “a lonely place if you’re alone;” and it is hard, if you’re LDS, not to read that line as an oblique allusion to Russel M. Nelson’s controversial Conference talk about a so-called “Sad Heaven,”^[15]“Come, Follow Me”, April 2019 General Conference wherein we will spend eternity separated from the family members we are not sealed with. Whether Sparhawk is contradicting that particular Church president, or unironically agreeing with him in the most despairing way possible, is of course one of those questions that will invariably reveal more about the listener than the singer.

But this is all getting into the realm of the merely speculative, so let us return to the album itself and hear the end of it: Alan Sparhawk on White Roses, My God has made the conscious decision to keep his fans and listeners at arm’s length. That is his right, and I can respect that; we must all grieve in our own way, and never try to impose our way on to others. But it is difficult to mourn with those that mourn when the mourning refuse to let us join them. White Roses, My God is an interesting experiment—he is still radically pushing the limits of his sound^[16]Even if synth-beats and vocoders are well over 40 years old by now., he is still Eternal Progression personified—and perhaps it will eventually grow on me upon repeat listens; but at present it remains a frustrating experiment, and the first genuine disappointment in Sparhawk’s three-decades-long career.^[17]“Brother” is a baller though, I’ll give him that.