Biography
It’s been a year since the release of The Low Lows’ majestic debut album, Fire On The Bright Sky. Their sophomore disc, Shining Violence, reveals a more feral, leaner balladry. Gone are the feminine layers of organs, pianos and vibraphones, replaced with melodically distorted guitar and smashing, trashy drums. Perhaps inevitably (considering their residence in small-town Georgia during the recording process) 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 despite their rawness, The Low Lows are 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, sloppy but deliberate, building to explosive, gospel-tinged, triumphal climaxes -- hook-laden, foundationed on distortion & embellished by brass.
Singer 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.
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-Owenson-
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, a woozy country narcosis.
In recent months the Low Lows have relocated to Austin Texas, and Noon’s musical partner Daniel
Rickard has quit the working band. He is replaced by Mikey Dwyer on bass & Abram Shook on combo
organs. Jeremy Wheatley, who along with Rickard formed the band with Noon in ‘06 after the dissolution of
their previous project (NYC’s Parker And Lily), remains on drums. The Low lows' live shows continue to be
their primary focus, and are raw, loud & sloppy, electric & visceral.
