Won’t you light and stay a while, love spider

I am a massive fan of Emusic, the online record shop that specialises in independent labels and makes iTunes look like the overstuffed high street retailer that it really is. I love the sheer variety of music I can find there, the online community based around it and the fact that there’s none of this iniquitous DRM stuff embedded in your purchases. It’s also ridiculously cheap, which helps too.

Parker & Lily / The Low Lows

Having said that, I’ve inexplicably failed to persuade anyone else to take the plunge, so it may just be me. But anyway, when I joined, three years ago, they were giving away 50 free downloads (I don’t think they’re quite as generous these days), and I gladly spent a good few of them on this album, by New York crooners Parker & Lily.

It was a little disappointing to hear, therefore, that Lily Wolfe and Parker Noon had called it a day, sometime last year, because Lily was going to concentrate on her acting career. I’ve done a quick trawl on Google and haven't found anything about Lily Wolfe, so I dunno how that’s going, but I can say that Parker Noon has moved onto new band the Low Lows.

Which is where I came across them, whilst mooching around on the Monotreme site… The Low Lows are named after Parker & Lily’s last album, which was released in 2004. What I really liked about Parker & Lily was their rather grandiose sense of melodrama, and of course those echoey chords that stretched out across their songs, but the new stuff isn’t really like this. You’ve still got the distant, flat voice of Parker Noon but there’s a stronger, slightly frantic guitar feel to the tracks I’ve heard.

So anyway, what I’ve done is upload a track you can find on the Monotreme site by the Low Lows and also a track by from the last Parker & Lily album, The Low Lows, called (you’re probably ahead of me here) “The Low Lows”. (Clever fond, my mother would say…)

The Low Lows – Parker & Lily

Dear Flies, Love Spider – The Low Lows

And then there’s this: