About The Low Lows
The Low Lows, in the beginning, seemed to embody certain formerly dormant aspects of Parker and Lily's strange late-phase sound. The implicit tension, not to say violence, that underlaid P&L's characteristically dense strata of organs and vibraphones, horns and strings, was, in the new band, made overt, fashioned into a weapon. In the interim between the bands, Noon's voice had somehow evolved radically from it's former breathy mumble into a high vibratoless wail evocative of Neil Young or Jim James, typically moving in slow-motion, at half-speed to the band..
Several European tours & a host of festivals played under the auspices of London's Monotreme Records showcased explosive, muscular live shows. The fractured and fragmented drumming of Jeremy Wheatley & the rhythm guitar and sad baritone vocal harmonies of Daniel Rickard make each Low Lows' performance a study in extremes. Stark southern sweetness gives way unexpectedly to great storms of guitar noise, bright walls of country narcosis crumble into climatic, stomping feedback distortion. Pure melodic love songs abound, made all the sweeter by virtue of being hemmed in by such a stormy darkness. They are raw, loud & sloppy, electric & visceral. The BBC recently called their live set "absolutely beautiful... one of our favorite sessions of the year. Marvelous."
In the first month of 2008, the Low Lows signed to Misra Records. Their sophomore album, Shining Violence, will be released in Europe on Monotreme Records in March, 2008, and on Misra Records in North America several months later. At first listen, the new record reveals a more feral, leaner balladry. Perhaps inevitably (considering their residence in small-town Georgia) primitive three-part harmony abounds, and steel guitar pervades most tracks, but these elements are incongruously trapped in an urban lo-fi noise-rock aesthetic like insects in amber. Noon's lyrics are stark though never bleak, and recount confessional love stories in a concentrated, reverberative, obliquely tragic prose, as if a Cormac McCarthy novel had been set to music. Songs like "Tigers" exalt small, everyday things with a potentially fatal intensity.
While the bulk of the record fits with only a modicum of discomfort into the lo-fi indie-americana file-folder, alongside Band of Horses, My Morning Jacket, Skygreen Leopards, Sparklehorse, Jason Molina and so on, the blasting drones & buried melodies of "Sparrows" and "Elizabeth Pier" evoke ghosts of the Velvets & Galaxie 500, and the ten-distortion-boxes-in-a-line guitar solos that punctuate almost all the songs reflect the true mechanics of the Low Lows, something distinctly meaner & more discontented than most of the current crop of longingly hopeful southern acts. A rousingly off-kilter back-porch version of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Modern Romance", and the fast Buck-Owens-on-smack two-step of "Five Ways I Didn't Die" are counterbalanced by the dense, urbane minimalism of "Raining In Eva"'s sad horns and the strange, airy epic of contendedness "Honey" that concludes the record. All of it resonates with a controlled tension, druggy slow burns, woozy layers of feedback trembling just out of earshot beneath a scratched, warm surface.
The Low Lows are currently in the process of relocating to Austin, Texas. As of late 2007 Daniel Rickard has quit the band (though he will continue in his capacity as primary recording engineer). The Low Lows are slated to play the Misra showcase at SxSW in March, followed by a month of European tours in April (covering Germany, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, and the UK) and then a longer run of of US tours later in the Spring.
RELEASES:
2006, Fire On The Bright Sky
(WARM Electronic Recordings / Monotreme Records)
2008, Shining Violence
(Misra Records / Monotreme Records)
MEMBERS:
P. L. Noon (vocals, guitar)
Jeremy Wheatley (drums)
PARKER & LILY
In 2001, singer P.L. Noon and organist Lily Wolfe formed the duo Parker & Lily. Based out of New York City's lower east side, they released 3 critically acclaimed but obscure albums over the course of the subsequent 4 years, and toured extensively in the US and Europe, playing & touring with the likes of Interpol, Magnetic Fields, Cat Power, Calvin Johnson, and My Morning Jacket.
Parker and Lily's three albums charted the course oftheir faltering love affair. The 2001 debut Hello Halo was a blissful, sugared snapshot of domestic romance, with only the occasional lover's tiff to offset the sweetness; a honeymoon for a New York couple clearly unaccustomed to such luck. By the time the 2002 follow-up was released their work had taken on a noticeably darker tone. Shot through with doubts and suspicions - though in the end still capable of the occasional pure and un-ironic love song - Here Comes Winter came mostly in the form of caustic Who's-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf-style domestic narratives.
The 2004 album titled The Low Lows was an implosive conclusion to the affair, a violent and bitter album of broad scope and unexpected viciousness. Recorded during the final few months of Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe's decade-long romance, The Low Lows is a set-piece of heartbreak songs, couched in a series of five and six-minute lo-fi mini-symphonies - hypnotic, rough-edged ballads, sung sadly; paranoid constructions, full of subtle malice and hidden agendas. From the titular ballad's falsetto-vocal and drum noise choruses to the long solo-steel-guitar intro of June Gloom's country narcosis, from Suit of Fire's driving, monotone meditation on lust to the backhanded Velvets homage Candy's Last Day, & ending with the climactic, stomping distortion of The Last Good Night's Stax/Volt coda, it's this barely contained violence that defines Parker & Lily's last record.
A year later, Noon reformed the band without Lily, bringing both P&L's former drummer Jeremy Wheatley & it's guitarist Daniel Rickard together once again in a trio named, in a nod to that final release, The Low Lows.
RELEASES:
2001, Hello Halo(Orange Records)
2002, Here Comes Winter
(Manifest Records /Houston Party Records)
2004, The Low Lows
(WARM Recordings /Houston Party Records)
MEMBERS:
P. L. (Parker) Noon (vocals, guitar)Lily Wolfe (piano, organ, vibraphone, etc)
Daniel Rickard (guitar, organ, harmonica, etc)
Jeremy Wheatley (drums)