Grief is a funny old thing, ain’t it?
And I’m talking about real grief here. Yeah, I know that you were really sad when the guy who played Joey on ‘Home Improvement’ died, or whatever, but that’s not the kind of grief I’m talking about. Actual grief isn’t just sadness. I got sad when Manchester United were knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid at the quarter final stage in 2000, but I don’t think you could accurately claim that I went through the grieving process. Yes, Redondo took us so thoroughly apart in that game that I am still suffering from post-traumatic shock, but that’s a separate thing. Real grief is far deeper than that. Your gran dying in 2003 was definitely a solemn moment, but she was 98 years old; hadn’t been able to take a shit since the late 1980’s; had three separate tracheostomies; still smoked 40 fags a day by sticking it one of the holes in her throat; and would angrily complain about you not letting her watch the latest episode of Minder long after that show was canceled in 1994. Also, she was really racist. Like, a proper vintage racist who still used terms from the mid 20th century that everyone else has forgotten, so you never realised how hateful and bigoted she was being every time she called your friend Kai a “spam fritter”. Yeah, it was a bit of a bummer when Granny Edna died, and you definitely called it grief when you managed to fenangle three weeks off work, but, come on, you didn’t really give that much of shit.
I’m also not talking about the great sense of relief and euphoria that someone’s death can occasionally inspire. For example, I was never a fan of the Charlie Brown comics, so when its creator Charles M. Schulz died in 2000, I actually felt a great weight lifted and was inspired from that moment on to become the standard of excellence that I am today.
They call this process “good grief”.
Really had to drag this post off on a tangent just to make that joke. Thank God it’s so hilarious that it was totally worth it.
No, actual grief is way more all encompassing than that. You’re not just in mourning, you’re forced to deal with the loss of a real part of your own self and your own life experience. The cliched way of describing it would be to say it’s like losing a limb, but it’s actually worse than that. I’ve lost limbs (essentially), and your body can actually adapt to it, your learn to live around it, and medical procedures can mask its absence better and better each year. Your consciousness can’t adapt to losing a large section of its support structure. There’s no Zimmer Frame to better distribute the weight and allow you to attempt to continue your life when a large portion of your very soul has suddenly imploded, leaving a black hole of nothingness at the base of your very being.
In November 2022, Alan Sparhawk lost their wife, bandmate, creative and life partner Mimi Parker to ovarian cancer. Low – who in mine and many other’s opinion were currently making the greatest music of their long career – were obviously immediately disbanded. At that point, on their artistic apex, the band was just Alan and Mimi. By November 2023, Alan obviously considered that they were at a point of their process that could only be faced with performing music again. They played some intimate and emotionally intense music festivals in Europe, where they debuted their first new material since Mimi’s passing. The new songs were devoted, raw, inspirational anthems of rebirth through lamentation. Alan and Mimi’s son, Cyrus, played bass at these shows.
OK, cool, we all thought. This next record is going to be some intense, intimate and beautiful ‘A Crow Looked At Me‘ style unflinching and harrowing grapple with grief through music.
OK, cool, thought Alan Sparhawk, but what if…?
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beatI made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beat
I made this beat, I made this beatI made it, I made it
I made it, I made it
I made it, I made it
I made it, I made itI made this
I made this
I made thisBeat
Beat
Beat
Beat
Beat
‘White Roses, My God’ is astonishingly audacious left turn. My God. Completely different not only from the delicate ‘slowcore’ that Low became famous for, but also from the already adventurous electronic directions the band would take their music in the latter part of their career. It’s a sparse and imposing set of often harsh sounding electronic wails of anguish. Sparhawk has chosen to translate their losses into ultra processed and autotuned cries, with lyrics that are often unintelligible and that Sparhawk has said were largely free association anyway. It’s an attempt to find new modes of expression for feelings that human language has thus far failed to properly explain. It calls to mind two other recent(ish) records that were also an attempt to struggle and communicate with grief. Like Nick Cave’s ‘Ghosteen‘, it discovers that accepted modes of speech and lyric writing can’t properly illustrate the overwhelming submergence of grief. But the record it most thematically and sonically close to is probably Kanye West’s ‘808s and Heartbreak’, when a pre-idiocy West dealt with his mother’s passing by similarly mutilating and distorting his voice. It creates a sense of both anger and confusion, but also of significant disassociation, like the artist can’t even grapple with their own reality anymore.
But more importantly: this shit’s full of fucking bangers. The songs are often primitive, these aren’t soundscapes and production flexes, they’re often dirty and dingy synth stabs that bumble your bowels, made on cheap electronic equipment that was originally purchased as a gift for Alan’s two kids. But the way the record so often wallows in the dark and grimy sewers of dank electronica only makes the moments of pure beauty like Heaven shine all the brighter. “Heaven is a lonely place when you’re alone”. Then the backing vocals of Alan and Mimi’s daughter Hollis come in and –argh! That hit me right in the FEELS, dude!!
A remarkable record.
Album Art as AI Image
AI is such a basic bitch sometimes, I swear…
Necessary Evil 
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