Monotreme Records: The Low Lows

The Low Lows' swirling, majestic debut album, Fire On The Bright Sky, was released in October 2006. The band was formed from the ashes of critically acclaimed New York dream pop band Parker and Lily, following Lily Wolfe’s departure to focus on writing film music. The remaining members, Parker Noon, Daniel Rickard and Jeremy Wheatley moved to Athens Georgia, and re-grouped to form The Low Lows, whose name was taken from the title of the final Parker and Lily album.

Their sophomore disc, Shining Violence, reveals a more feral, leaner balladry. Gone are the feminine layers of organs, pianos and vibraphones, replaced with minimalist, melodically distorted guitar and smashing, trashy drums.

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. Nostalgia-free, doleful & intensely modern, the primitive rawness of The Low Lows is the natural product of an anachronistic environment, worried not at all about being out-of-step with its time. Songs progress in stately, off-kilter, dreamlike form, slow and deliberate, building to explosive, gospel-tinged, triumphal climaxes -- hook-laden, foundationed on distortion & embellished by brass.

P. L. Noon’s distinctive keening voice is in full swing here, residing uneasily somewhere in the high vibratoless territory between Neil Young and Jim James, typically moving in slow-motion, often at half-speed to the band. His 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 the sheer contentedness of the condemned man, a potentially fatal intensity.

While the bulk of the album 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, etc, 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, layers of feedback trembling just out of earshot
beneath a scratched-surface warmth, a woozy country narcosis.

The Low lows' live shows remain their primary focus, and are raw, loud, electric & visceral. The BBC’s ‘The Beat’ recently called their live session "absolutely beautiful... one of my favorite sessions of the year. Marvelous."

The Low Lows will also be releasing ‘Shining Violence’ in North America on Misra Records (Centro-Matic, Phosphorescence, Shearwater, Destroyer, Great Lake Swimmers, South San Gabriel, St Thomas, Mendoza Line etc.) and will be touring Europe and North America extensively in 2008.

Album credits:

Parker Noon – guitar, vocals
Daniel Rickard – acoustic guitar, bass organ, harmonica, vocals
Jeremy Wheatly – Drums

With: Eva Hannon – bass ~ Lily Wolfe – organs, Rhodes & vibraphone ~
Jared Theis – clarinet ~ Josiah McGaughey – Drums on IMBL ~ Matt Stossel & John Neff – steel guitars ~ Perrish, Kevin Hyde David Nelson & Bassam Mussat – brass ~ Amanda Kapasouz - strings