No Throwaways: Alan Sparhawk's White Roses, My God

Nothing's wasted if it's human

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The band Low emerged in Duluth, Minnesota with a remit so simple it risked being a schtick: “rock music, but play it slow.” For thirty years, the husband-and-wife duo at the center of it, Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk, gradually built on this template until Low’s sensibility became more an ethos than a style, somehow encompassing dirges, lullabies, anthems, and head-bangers, lacing each song with a combination of doom-laden pessimism and sly humor. The sound evolved until it was almost unrecognizable, from standard guitars-and-drums in their first album to more orchestrated, atmospheric rock on mid-career highpoint Trust, to the Postal Service-on-vicodin beeps and blips of 2007’s Drums and Guns, and finally to the truly wild electronic experiments of their last two albums, Double Negative and HEY WHAT. But Low was always somehow Low, with an intangible coherence that never waivered over three decades.

Mimi Parker’s tragic death in 2022 came near Low’s creative peak. HEY WHAT–finished almost on Parker’s deathbed–was a striking album, reworking the distorted, fuzzed-out beats the band had developed on Double Negative to create mini-suites; songs that contained worlds so full it was surprising they were mere minutes long. Album stand-out “Days Like These” somehow delivers a cathartic chorus with a head-banging gravity that can only be described as heavy–as Ozzy Osborne would use the term–while keeping the standard Low tempo and almost-too-pretty harmonies of the lead duo glisteningly intact.