LABEL:      Monotreme Records / Konkurrent
WEBSITE:  www.thelowlows.net
MUSIC:     MySpace
VIDEO:     Dear Flies Love Spider Video
               Black Bees Video
AGENT:     Joost Kamp

BIOGRAPHY:
It's been a year since the resignation of Lily Wolfe closed the books on critically acclaimed NYC dream-pop quartet Parker & Lily, and six months since the reconfiguration of the remaining members into the Georgia trio named (after Parker & Lily's third and final album) The Low Lows. Fire On The Bright Sky is their debut album, and it's a radiant, desperate prom-night of a record.

Opener 'Dear Flies, Love Spider' sets the tone, with its scorched-earth production and singer P.L. Noon sounding as though he's trying to reach us from the other end of the galaxy, nursery-rhyming his way blindly through the outer dark. Noon’s high vocal moan has a kind of hollowed-out majesty here that’s typical of The Low Lows, a proud lack of dependence on anyone or anything else regardless of cost, along with a willful refusal to apologise for it ("Wolves eat dogs / & knives are for carving / I was wrong but I was starving...”).

Despite the evident human warmth in songs like “Lane Fire” and “Poor Georgia”, and the fierce embrace of its various objects of desire, 'Fire OnThe Bright Sky' has few soft edges – this is no miserable melancholy or theatrical emo angst, but rather a scratched, prickly hypersensitivity, self-reliant almost to the point of hostility. Stark southern sweetness gives way unexpectedly to great storms of guitar noise, bright walls of country narcosis crumble into climactic, stomping feedback and distortion. Sheets of dissonance and Noon's arcing wail conjure Galaxie 500 (Noon is credited on the album sleeve only with “feeding back, reverberating”) or Electr-O-Pura era Yo La Tengo, while elsewhere the Lou Reed-style drone and baritone vocal of 'Velvet' conjure, perhaps, a more driving Magnetic Fields.

On the occasions when an openly vulnerable feel surfaces – in 'Poor Georgia', for instance - the contrast between the distanced starkness of the music and the shy, guileless love-lyrics (“Mandy / Is frail as a cane reed / Her eyes are birds in a tall tree / Swaying sweetly) emphasizes the conflict at the heart of The Low Lows - at least, that is, till the understated drum roll and gently sublime brass climb lift it briefly to a soar and all is reconciled. Likewise in distorted, melodic love-songs such as "(No Such Thing As) Sara Jane”, vulnerabilities seem sweeter by virtue of being hemmed in by such a stormy darkness.

The Low Lows' live show is a dishevelled but exhilarating beast, typically faster and much noisier than the albums, saturated with Daniel Rickard's rolling, distorted Farfisa and driven by Jeremy Wheatley's insistent drums. Pre-release tours have already generated glowing response: "Monstrously sad and brilliantly anachronistic... Three sparkling, slightly surreal rock icons that seem to have been constructed out of feedback and white noise. Like werewolves mutating, feedback drips from freshly exposed fangs... Then suddenly they return to us, playing pretty, remorseful songs about the carnage they caused..." (Los Angeles Weekly). The Low Lows are currently in the studio putting the finishing touches to their second full-length, "Tigers", and are slated to tour (the U.S. in September/October and) Europe in November/December of 2006.


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