Darker With The Day

This morning's episode features an interview with Low’s Alan Sparhawk. White Roses, My God, his incredible —and first— solo record, came out Friday, September 27th on Sub Pop Records.

Plus the following review, featured just prior to Project 4 Ever by Alan Sparhawk.

Alan Sparhawk: White Roses, My God (Sub Pop)

Released 27th September, 2024

When Mimi Parker passed away in 2022, after a two-year battle with ovarian cancer, Alan Sparhawk lost his wife, closest collaborator and bandmate of thirty years. Their group, Low, was known for their exquisite vocal harmonies, but also their penchant for experimentation. Low frequently challenged accepted musical boundaries, with their earliest albums notable for their crawling, glacial pace and low volumes, whilst their latter releases embraced electronic distortion and sonic deconstruction.

Low’s final records, 2018’s Double Negative and 2021’s Hey What are considered two of the greatest albums released since the turn of the century. Both are masterful displays of innovation that manage to sound equally frightening and comforting, whilst feeling simultaneously futuristic and familiar. Within the framework of these two albums, Low completely deconstruct the DNA of each song, manipulating, then reassembling them whilst maintaining the heart and humanity that lies at their core.

With White Roses, My God, Sparhawk’s first solo album, he continues this push into uncharted musical territory. Composed primarily using electronic instruments, such as synthesisers and drum machines, the album is notable for its pitch-affected vocals. On first listen this effect can be jarring, but once acclimated, its utilisation enhances the voice’s role as an instrument, exacerbating the emotional element of Sparhawk’s vocals.

Sparhawk described his process for writing the album as, “Messing with the drum machine and the synth that was kind of just around the house.” Adding, “It takes a lot of stabbing around. I would mess around for about an hour and there would be maybe a minute and a half somewhere in there that would be worth going back and checking on.” His excitement for these moments of discovery is evident across all of the album’s eleven tracks but is most notable on I Made This Beat. Running just shy of two minutes, it features Sparhawk repeating the song’s title over a rudimentary drumbeat and pulsing, danceable, synth lines. I Made This Beat is almost childlike in its sense of pride and wonder, imbued with the enthusiasm of achievement that comes after long periods of unsuccessfully trying to break new ground.

Get Still opens the record and provides an early highlight, its woozy ambience and joyous chorus strike a perfect balance between the sombre and the celebratory. Closing out the album is another standout, Project 4 Ever. Propelled by electronic drones and punctuated by bursts of crackling static, Project 4 Ever is the track most reminiscent of Sparhawk’s previous work, bearing some similarity to songs such as Quorum or Tempest off Double Negative.

Perhaps the album’s most heartbreaking moment is one of its briefest, the one-minute track Heaven. Musing on the afterlife and the loss of a loved one, it contains the line, “Heaven, it’s a lonely place if you’re alone.” Whether the song is intended to be from the perspective of the departed or those they left behind is unclear, but it possesses significant emotional weight for a song of such short length.

It would be easy to describe White Roses, My God as a “grief album,” similar to Ghosteen by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but do so is to ignore the playfulness that is ingrained within its every note. It would be more apt to consider it an album created in spite of grief rather than in response to it. White Roses, My God marks the beginning of a new chapter in Sparhawk’s life and career. After three decades in a band, he is now making music on his own. In doing so he has crafted a strange but beautiful album, a testament to the power of music and a poignant reminder of the human spirit’s ability to endure.

Nick Stephan