Alan Sparhawk : White Roses, My God
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: White Roses, My God is not Alan Sparhawk‘s greatest record. We will debate, I think, whether it even counts as among his middle third. This also feels, pressingly, not the point of this record. If I were to be flippant, I might say that I didn’t expect Sparhawk of all people to feel the energy of brat summer too, named after the already canonical pop record which is deservedly reserving its place on year-end lists even among the aggravating social media “yes, and”-ing taking place. This would itself only be half-flippant, though, and not even really a surprise; the final days of Low, after all, saw the group interpolating Bon Iver, even tapping his long-time producer, to explore the digitalist frontier of their well-honed country-folk songwriting interior. Sparhawk likewise has always been open to explore hip-hop, blues, funk and other spaces in side projects along the years. This is a record that, like many solo albums, is only a surprise if you’ve had a myopic view of someone’s creative process.
This is in many ways clearly a griefsong, something made in the wake of the passing of not only his wife, not only the mother of his children, but also his life partner, something deeper than both of those previous titles, the generative core of any relationship that passes over the endless lacunae of decades together. But compare this to A Crow Looked at Me or even Ghosteen, relatively recent works themselves informed by grieving. In one view, White Roses comes as a hybrid of those two, condensing the electronic ambient explorations of the latter with the confessional and direct songwriting of the former. But more than those records, made by people that can comfortably be called peers for Sparhawk, it far more resembles… well, Charli XCX, or hyperpop in general for that matter. The vocoder-and-synth heavy wing of hip-hop and R&B, pioneered by musical savants who’ve since revealed some shockingly stupid interiors, always weighs heavily on this record, different ways of approaching that same bareness and openness of the heart.
It is precisely the imperfection of this record that makes it so compelling. These are naive works, Sparhawk fucking about with a drum machine and vocal effects without clear direction or intent. It’s clear that these are the kinds of songs that pour out of you when you sit down and muck around for a bit, freestyle lyrics, settle into a basic groove, not unlike the recently-released quite spare demos Prince made. We’ve heard serious work from Sparhawk from years; this is a record of him at play, a revelation of grief as something other than just crushing sorrow. That something as joyful and fun and uninhibited as this can occur within the grim light of heavy grief is a buoyant and insightful thing, the laughter in the face of death, the reminder that joy is a choice. This is a thing I think about often: our image of the professional and appropriate is one devoid of so much of what makes life what it is, from the sensual to the gross to the absurd to the extreme. Even a great deal of music that is supposedly bare in its humanity often offers us overly melodramatic dross pretending to be that what it means to be alive, which is often silly and stupid and gross and weird. We have an entire body of work by Sparhawk that explores the other often more severe contours of the human, already-aggrieved before that great loss he and his children suffered recently. It is a joyful shock that something this bright could emerge after that.
Certainly a review of this record would look different if this was a debut instead of a new record in a long, long career, if I were the type of writer to look merely at a text and not at the life and world it emerges from. But this, like Trans before it, that brilliant long-disparaged genius record by Neil Young, part of its intense beauty emerges from its broader narrative. It’s not hard to hear these songs and to overlay Mimi’s voice, to replace the programmed drums with her commanding arrangement with a simple kit. He chose not to replicate those easier paths, to instead let what feel like well-polished demos get released as they are. We often view sincerity as something that emerges via a piano, an acoustic guitar, a simple human voice. A brief look at these lyrics which, like brat before it, are startling in their absolute directness shows is that this is perhaps the most unadorned and direct album of Sparhawk’s career. I summon with all my power a collaborative record with Lambchop and Bruce Hornsby, fellow pioneers of this digitalist singer-songwriter terrain. Rerelease this record with a bright green cover and lowercase blockprint lettering.
Label: Sub Pop
Year: 2024
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Alan Sparhawk : White Roses, My God
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