ABC Pick

The Low Lows, Summer Hymns, The New Sound of Numbers

Friday, May 26, 40 Watt Club

originally published May 24, 2006

Parker Noon’s engagement with Parker & Lily, his old band, arose in part from his dissatisfaction with the noisy rock he played as a member of Valentine Six. All of his favorite records, he realized, were slow jams, so he decided to write and record some. With his erstwhile partner Lily Wolfe as his vocal foil, he dropped three albums. Good ones. The peripatetic couple relocated from NYC to Athens, where they became the melodious toast of…oh, that scene changes every four years or so, but you know the archetypes.

But acceptance didn’t hold Parker & Lily together – in 2006, they dissolved the band. (Wolfe now makes soundtracks.) And it never extinguished the feral pain that singed the outer edges of their gentle, Farfisa-fueled ballads. By the time of the 2005 LP The Low Lows, the dread and despair in Noon’s music had matured considerably. The old models didn’t quite hold it.

As is Noon’s way, his old doubts became his new faith. With P&L vets Daniel Rickard on keys and Jeremy Wheatley on drums, he formed a new band and named it after his last melancholy dance with Wolfe.

The band began, says Noon, with “a pact to record three full-lengths this year… Everything about the new band flowed from that initial decision." And right out of the box, The Low Lows hit with sweltering sorrow. There’s no nuanced cleverness to Fire on the Bright Sky, the band’s debut set to release late this summer, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s Noon’s most resolute work to date, a triumph of concentrated mourning for all the regrets that never answer to hope or logic. If Closing Time-era Tom Waits had coughed up blood on the original charts for Neil Young’s On The Beach and faxed them into the future, The Low Lows would be using them to make some powerful spitballs.

Emerson Dameron

Emerson Dameron