Alan Sparhawk – White Roses, My God

Sub Pop

New Alan Sparhawk then. His first solo record and his first since the last Low record. I don’t want to make this review about Low or Mimi Parker, but you’d forgive Sparhawk for making the saddest fucking record you ever heard.

Now I’m not saying he hasn’t done that, but he’s certainly not occupying Low territory — not in terms of timbre, arrangement. Chord progressions maybe. This record is something like an answer to the question “what if Alan Sparhawk got stoned and made a loop-based record with absolutely gratuitous use of vocal effects?” I suspect that that’s not a question many amongst the Low faithful wanted answered but, really, they’ve been with Sparhawk through a lot. They can peer through all the bright, shiny, neon effects on this and see a blinding record in a different sense.

There’s a lot on this record that is positively fun “I Made This Beat” is a funky number with a repetitious vocal line (“I made this beat / I made this beat” ad infinitum). It’s somewhere in the territory of feeding Prince too much sugar. “Station” may be something like Sparhawk-goes-trap — hi-hats all over it and Sparhawk barely-legibly ranting on about something. Bass up in here doing bass shit.

I’m struggling to make out lyrics on this record in a way that is probably in common with post-Double Negative Low but has an extra opacity for me — while the last two Low records certainly weren’t legible throughout, there were certainly moments where the characteristic lyrical parity and clarity was front-and-centre. Here there’s the odd phrase you can pick up (“there’s a party in the basement” in “Somebody Else’s Room”) but by and large anything that’s discernible is a loop for a dancey number.

I should say that this is definitely a weird record. There’s a definite manic vibe to it. But manic in the sense of “gaaah these toys are fucking cool” rather than melancholy. It might be that Sparhawk is reaching into religious epiphany. It might be that he’s just having a laugh. But also — it’s worth saying that the “what are you doing Alan” of the record quickly wears off. It’s definitely a record that’ll sit on a few end-of-year lists, provided there’s not too many spurned Low-lovers.

The vocoding / autotune could easily be cloying, but there’s a sense that Sparhawk has spent the last however long buried in textures — despite the minimal material to the tracks, and the looping stuff, there’s a balance to the musical-toys production that separates it from bedroom productions. And having said that — this has to be a bedroom production. All the intimacy and fun of not having a label breathing down his neck for Low 2 and all the careful workings of a producer who has (possibly) smoked a whole bunch of weed.

Maybe oddest of all — this could open up Sparhawk to a bunch of new people. This is only so many tempi away from the sort of post-crabcore autotune business of the last decade or so. There’s guitar arrangements here — “Brother” for definite, but the cyclical chords elsewhere suggest he’s still writing on guitar. So perhaps he’ll venture into another side of indie, another world of fans. I’d hope so. It’s a cracking record.

Big up yourself, Alan.

-Kev Nickells-