Customer Reviews

Here Comes Winter

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought my first Parker and Lily cd after seeing them play at Brownies in the East Village. They were so dreamy and hypnotic that I actually left a rock club relaxed and happy. Here Comes Winter is sophisticated and luxurious. It serves as excellent background music but is also edgy and alluring and deserves to be listened to on big cushy headphones in the dark. All music supervisors for movies and television should listen to this CD.

a few years back i caught `parker and lily' at the knitting factory (in nyc), and i've been stalking them ever since. the word `Lynch-ian' gets bandied about a fair amount these days, but this is something the ol' boy scout could really lose an ear over. sly, preoccupied, glum but with a bit of glitz--insert your lounge hipster cliche here, but rest assured that you'll soon be head over heels like me. it's the music, dummy; ignore the rest.

Just picked up a copy of Parker and Lily's "Here Comes Winter" and it is now officially in HEAVY rotation chez moi! This is a great album to listen to really loud or with headphones, not because this is "loud music" per se but because the songs are so lovingly performed and the production really lets each instrument and reverb-drenched vocal breathe...creating so many textures. Such a rich patina of subtleties! Listening to this album is like wrapping yourself in an analog blanket of warm and rich tones and timbres. Some of the songs have vocals and some are instrumentals and each one gives off a unique mood, sometimes dark...sometimes comforting and sometimes both simultaneously. It seems that many of the songs would fit perfectly in a film score. Personal favorites include "Motel Lights," "Violet In Violet," "You are My Matinee" and "Hello Halo."

I think I've found my personal soundtrack for this coming cold and lonely season...

Parker and Lily have a wonderful talent for writing mood music. They could be writing for dark movies with their feeling for dark corners. I will throughly enjoy this album in the winter as well as the evenings of the future.

Excavated right out of Americana's underbelly, Here Comes Winter offers smart and poetic insights into a world where heat, sweat and cigarettes fuse into mellow nocturnal grooves. Parker and Lily's music can feel like an endless desert road at night or, at times, voices muffled by crowded city streets. But whether the images evoked are of an empty night or of an Edward Hopper painting portraying two people alone together, Here Comes Winter captures longing and distance with subtle shifting rhythms. The ghosts that haunt Here Comes Winter may be of the artists and poets haunting our American landscape or they may even be our own internal demons finally calmed by lullabies written just for them. It's beautiful and subtle.

Mellow, subtle, rhythmic, engrossing: this album is not for those who are impatient with music, but for those who have high standards. The lyrics flow between the beats with the same slow melodic rhythm as the echoing keyboards and guitars. My favorite tracks (in order): for C.L. (iowa is passing by), idle in idlewild, you are my matinee, violet in violet, (not to overlook "hello halo" and "my apartment complex" but really there isn't a bad track on this album) . . . also see their first album: Hello Halo. P.S. These guys are incredible in live performance!

A soundscape built from vintage instrumentation with nods (e.g. minimal drum machine beats and a charmingly postmodern, self-mocking lyrical sense) to modernity. A popular combination these days, to be sure, but this is a stellar manifestation of the trend. The dusky, moody harmonies of Here Comes Winter call to mind a slow dance in taffetta in a humid high school gym circa 1956. Noon's transmittal-from-a-distant-star vocals ground the album in spooky, lonesome beauty.

This is a great record --- my candidate for best of the year so far. Forget the Strokes, French Kicks, Interpol, etc (well, just for a minute, anyway) --- Parker and Lily are more about the soft, scaly underbelly of New York City, the frayed, romantic, after-hours strung-out coming-down experience --- more three A.M. in Williamsburg than midnight on Avenue A, if you see what I mean. It's all kind of Velvets-y ("Sunday Morning"-era), and kind of Tindersticks-y ("Tiny Tears"-era), and also a little reminiscent of Mazzy Star -- but more nervous and urban, and also maybe a little more melodic. Cat Power, Black Box Recorder, Galaxie 500, Arab Strap, Cowboy Junkies, Smog, Red House Painters, and Goldfrapp are all kind of similar to P+L, in different ways...

I had the chance to see this duo (now a 4-piece I see) at Mercury Lounge last year and they were so great-- truly a special band. I put this cd in for late night drives home. Cute and creepy mood music from start to finish!

Excavated right out of Americana's underbelly, Here Comes Winter offers smart and poetic insights into a world where heat, sweat and cigarettes fuse into mellow nocturnal grooves. Parker and Lily's music can feel like a desert road at night or, at times, voices muffled in crowded city streets. But whether the images evoked are of an empty night or of an Edward Hopper painting portraying two people alone together, Here Comes Winter captures longing and distance with subtle shifting rhythms. The ghosts that haunt Here Comes Winter may be of the artists and poets haunting our American landscape or they may be our own internal demons finally calmed by lullabies written just for them. It's beautiful and subtle.