There's no wrong way to grieve, but things can get complicated when there's an audience for your grief. It's particularly tough when said audience might have an idea how they'd like you to share it with them. Such is the challenge put before Alan Sparhawk's debut solo album. Sparhawk's group Low was a beautiful, fragile and perpetually transcendent music force for three decades, all of which he shared with his musical partner and wife, Mimi Parker. The two had been a couple since before they were teenagers, and Parker's 2022 death by cancer at age 55 plays out in the margins of White Roses, My God in a way that might frustrate the more direct and traditionalist members of Sparhawk's fan base.
The earliest version of Low featured the kind of gradually constructed minimalist elegies that encouraged your heart to swell in joy or sorrow. Over time, that sound matured and evolved to take on so many extra tones, colours and emotions. Low's last two albums were also their most experimental, surrounding Sparkhawk and Parker's vocal harmonies with electronic processing and distorted noise. Sparhawk's solo work dives even deeper into a world where technology becomes the context and often the essential mode of expression, if not the message itself.
Sparhawk's distinctive vocals and guitar are nowhere to be found, replaced by a voice, or often voices, that are treated with Auto-Tune to a degree where age and gender are dissolved. These are nested within a panic of beats and keyboards that blends Trap, EDM and Hyperpop styles. Taken without any background insight, the songs come across as clever and well-constructed but slightly shallow and glossy in a way that deflects the need to probe for deeper meaning. "I Made This Beat" appears to be a track about making a beat. However, on the subsequent "Not the 1" and "Can U Hear," as Sparkhawk plays with harmonies, new purposes for the technology are revealed. Finally, on the very brief "Heaven," ("Heaven is a lonely place if you're alone / I want to be there with the people that I love") he approximates Parker's voice in the middle distance of the song to a degree that is chilling, and it becomes clear that what seemed to be a lark speaks to something more.
Others have mentioned precedents to this album's strategies, from Prince's pitch-shifted creation of his Camille alter ego to Neil Young's 1983 Vocoder experiments on Trans. A more extreme example is the case of Throbbing Gristle iconoclast Genesis P. Orridge who, along with their partner Lady Jaye, underwent several plastic surgeries to blend or erase their genders and closely approximate each other's appearances. Sparhawk's plastic electronics are less invasive but still serve to create a new reality, sublimating the sadness and anger to a degree where they are less raw and more manageable. If not to specifically summon spirits, it is at least a place where he allows his own identity to dissolve and meld with the music itself, a ghost in his own machine.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Sparhawk spoke to the ecstasy captured in Cher's Auto-Tune smash "Believe." He draws a parallel between the song and White Roses, My God's "Feel Something" — a song where the search for feeling and meaning is far more plaintive, but still reveals a hope for life after love.