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The Low Lows, Music For One, & Lorenzo Snow Collective...sun 11th March @ The Tunnels


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DiZZY SToRM and Interesting Music Promotions are coming together, (and are very excited) to bring to aberdeen THE LOW LOWS, an absolutely beautiful/enchanting/eerie (go listen and decide for yourself!) act from Georgia, USA, who's album FIRE ON A BRIGHT SKY was released on Monotreme Records (home of 65daysofstatic, Picastro, Barzin to name a few..) in oct 2006, and who will be releasing a new 2 song single on the label in march.....

Its been a year since the resignation of Lily Wolfe closed the books on NYC dream-pop quarter 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, their debut album, is a radiant, desperate prom-night of a record. here's just a few of the great reviews it has received......

ALL MUSIC - "The Low Lows create pretty, pretty lo-fi dirges driven by lightly chugging guitars, Farfisa organ, and treated vocals. Some might place them firmly in the lineage of the Velvet Underground -- and the feedback squalls and oddly archaic tendencies would back that connection. But at times there's also something soft and delicately enchanting about the Low Lows that places them in line with acts like Galaxie 500 ,Red House Painters , or the more delicate tendencies of Sparklehorse . Highlights include the Western-gothic drama of "Dear Flies, Love Spider" and Wolves Eat Dogs." The Low Lows also seem to be at their best when they slow things down to a funeral pace and extract every drop of drama and beauty out of each moment, as in the hauntingly gorgeous "Poor Georgia." This is a solid, lovely effort that sails on the back of strong songwriting and uniquely mournful vocals."

SPLENDID Venomously confessional... one of the most voyeuristic and tragic musical projects in recent memory Noon has shaved his observations on his breakup with Wolfe into lyrics so concise, they're reach haiku-like proportions of succinctness... (they) have succeeded in capturing an extraordinarily elusive human experience...one of the most perfectly lilting vocal styles that I've heard in some time...it's melancholy, yet hopeful...a beautifully melded combination of Galaxie 500 and Mazzy Star...so beautiful that you'll want to repeat these tracks over and over. The only thing that'll keep you from riding the "repeat" button is the fact that each new track is as striking as the music that came before it.

BUFFALO NEWS "Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe delve deeply into the rather twisted and heavy-weathered emotional landscape of their relationship throughout the moody and beautiful 15 songs. All are eerily intimate. All are nigh on unforgettable as well. Fans of the wispy, flower-in-a-rainstorm esoterica of Tindersticks or the work Julee Cruise has done on various David Lynch soundtracks will find plenty to love. Noon's creepy Lou Reed-like sung-spoken vocals, subtle baritone and steel guitar work, and disturbingly poetic lyrics forge a marriage made in hell with Wolfe's organ, electric piano, vibraphone and disembodied vocals. The results reach the shore of the listener in seemingly small, innocuous waves, but their undercurrent is sinister and powerful... It's the most unsettling document of the inner recesses and hidden spaces in a love relationship since Yo La Tengo's masterful "And Then Everything Turned Itself Inside Out."

www.myspace.com/thelowlows

Monotreme Records

SUN 11TH MARCH

THE TUNNELS

8PM

5

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main support for the night will come from MUSIC FOR ONE which is the project of Canadian guitarist Sherry Ostapovitch, who is now based in the UK. Her reputation has slowly built up on the back of impressive live performances and a handful of EPs. Crafted out of melodic, looped guitar lines, rattles, scrapes and buzzes,

Sherry has performed on bills alongside Sunn0))), Christina Carter, and Do Make Say Think. Up until now MUSIC FOR ONE has been an electric entity merging stark guitar motifs against clicks and crackles created from bits from the hardware store and effects pedals. But on her trip to Canada this summer she acquired a beautiful metal-bodied acoustic resonator guitar. So she is now shunning electricity (only some areas of her life, mind) for acoustic wonderfulness. New sounds, ideas, and directions are always emerging but my delicate balance of emotive quiet and stillness up against bawdier bristleyness is there. "What would have happened if electricity hadn't been invented? What would the acoustic blues musicians and folkies sound like today? What would John Cage and Morton Feldman sound like played on a dobro? Would all music be more improvisational? In truth these questions are somewhat of an afterthought... I just play guitar and let what filters through me be.."

for more info go to hello and welcome to music for one

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  • 4 weeks later...

I see the album got a 7.3 from pitchfork...nae bad.

The Low Lows grew out of the spacey dream-pop minimalism of Parker & Lily: Parker Noon, lead singer and songwriter, named his new band after the final album he made as a duo with Lily Wolfe. Musicians recruited to work with Parker & Lily-- multi-instrumentalist Daniel Rickard and drummer Jeremy Wheatley-- have joined Noon in the Low Lows, and while Wolfe appears on Fire on the Bright Sky, playing organ and contributing a song, she won't be part of the trio going forward.

So at a glance, not much has changed for the musicians who comprise the Low Lows, but the new group feels like the work of an entirely different group of people. Rather than the hints of twee and dinky electronics that characterized Parker & Lily, Fire on the Bright Sky draws on country by way of grimy back alleys; it's creepy, lo-fi, rough around the edges, and dark of heart. Relative to Parker & Lily, the Low Lows have thickened the production and changed the backdrop and lighting, readying the stage for Noon's tales of gothic Americana.

"Dear Flies, Love Spider" opens, and the title tells you everything about the record's mood. "Dear flies, always outside the porchlight/ Bright eyes, like deer beside highways at twilight/ Won't you come inside." The band does a nice job behind those words, building tension from verse to verse. They're terribly patient, winding around the song's center with trebly strummed guitar and brushed drums before shouldering in for the climax-- a creaky organ pushed through a distortion pedal that sounds like it was dragged down the stairs from Norman Bates' parlor. This sort of bolero approach-- spinning the song around a single point, waiting for the right movement to sweep in with a big chord change and the emotional kill-- is something the Low Lows do well. "White Liner" is another highlight in this vein. Here the organ is even more devastating, pulled from a blurrier and more heavily scuffed photograph, and the final refrain where Noon repeats the title is powerful, as he gives his vocal processing a spiky, redzone workout.

A few tracks are less stylized and get by instead on tight, disciplined melody. "St. Neil" might well be a tribute to 1960s folkie and proto singer-songwriter Fred Neil, and with its tremolo twang and pedal steel whine, it comes across as late-60s country filtered through paisley underground dream pop. "Lane Fire" is a spacious, weepy ballad that surges big on the chorus, with rapidly strummed guitars and a twirling rope of pedal steel. And "Velvet", with the guitars coasting on a one-chord drone, dissonant organ chords, and metallic processing laden with echo, makes me wonder where Nico might be hiding.

The Low Lows have listened to a lot of good music and have some very clear influences, so Fire on the Bright Sky is nothing earth shattering. But Noon has an ace up his sleeve, the same card that made his former band so compelling: his voice. Noon's croon, usually processed to accentuate its reedy midrange and then lacquered with reverb, conveys longing, desperation, and threat, depending on the needs of a song. I'd call it one-of-a-kind if his phrasing didn't at times bear such a resemblance to Morrissey at his most somnambulant, channeling the half-drugged whisper of "Asleep", with a hint of Jim James from My Morning Jacket thrown in. Dropping such an expressive instrument into the middle of the trashy, neo-roots countrified VU clamor gives the Low Lows a sound just distinctive enough to warrant a deeper listen, and Fire on the Bright Sky winds up giving back.

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