FREE WILLIAMSBURG, Feb. 2002
"One of the most impressive bands to emerge from New York in some time..."
FORTUNE MAGAZINE, October 28. 2002
by Jeff Gordinier
"Like a Jeff Koons sculpture or a David Lynch movie, the music of Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe revels in the kink at the heart of kitsch. It's all nice and pretty on the surface - chiming bells, twinkly keyboards, breathy vocals - but what keeps you coming back is an underlying thrum of creepiness."
CHICAGO NEW CITY, August 02, 2001
"...masters of textured melancholy...psychedelia for barbituate users...delicately sad and downbeat...furry-puppy pop...'Hello Halo' sits somewhere between early Velvet Underground and the Cowboy Junkies...strangely alluring, even beautiful."
BOSTON PHOENIX, November 8 2002
by Robin Vaughan
“The duo’s new Here Comes Winter confirms that they’ve done well to follow their instincts into deeper explorations of romance in glamorous ruin. It’s a Coney Island of the mind to be reckoned with, a surreal psychic ride between sweet nostalgia and brutal reality, the superficial and the sublime... the time is somewhere between 1960 and the future, and the scenery is a slow-rolling panorama of late-night subway rides and neon cocktail signs, smoke-filled motel rooms, glaring airport terminals, streaks of landscape through the windows of a moving car... The lyrics tell the story cryptically, with a precise, poetic minimalism that says little and suggests everything, as in “You Are My Matinee”, a stirring little six-line poem on the subject of an illicit encounter... Duality is the essential principle of Here Comes Winter - the album’s considerable merit lies in a yin/yang harmony of unflinching extremes. Beautiful sweeps of steel guitar against a sea of faraway electronics. Wolfe’s bubbly, girlish harmonies against Noon’s low, menacingly sexual monotone... The album’s charming mix of kitschy retro-references -- 1960’s french pop, perky Japanese teen beats, ‘50s mambo, Martin Denny tiki-melodies -- makes the underlying hypnotic melancholia that much more tragic ...lounge music as candy-coated nightmare. ”
AUSTIN CHRONICLE, August 09, 2001
"moody pop noir... their debut Hello Halo is already driving gape-jawed hipsters to mention them in the same breath as tweelitist idols Black Box Recorder and Tindersticks."
CMJ NEW MUSIC MONTHLY, October 2002
by Steve Klinge
"This NYC duo...could freeze your heart with slow, gorgeous, unassuming angst-folk... whispery and understated; it's slow to the point of stasis, like someone's mind coming to terms with an emotional trauma... When Lil sings, her vulnerable soprano disguises her lyrical barbs... but Parker takes most of the vocals, talk-singing in the manner of Tindersticks' Stuart Staples or Lambchop's Kurt Wagner, although with even more detachment - his "Motel Lights" is so fragile that one false breath could make the whole thing disappear. Often the aftermath of the party is more interesting than the party itself... Here Comes Winter is cold and dark enough to chill the warmest heart."
AMG ALL-MUSIC GUIDE, October 2002
by MacKenzie Wilson
"...Here Comes Winter is as charming as it's predecessor...Lily Wolfe is an angel with her warm, girlish vocals, while her partner, Parker Noon's, vocal hushing is nearly cheerless. Together they're a darling pair, making Here Comes Winter a daydreamy songbook of broken hearts...how imperfect they might be as lovers makes for a mesmerizing set of songs. There's a genuine sense of longing and desire on Here Comes Winter but without self-pity. Their art is divinely complex and that's what makes Parker and Lily so interesting. "
SPLENDID E-ZINE, October 2001
by Amy Leach
"Noon has 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."
CHICAGO READER, November 01 2002
by Monica Kendrick
“These cool, brittle-sounding New Yorkers have added a pair of percussionists since recording their second album... their contributions should add a little density to the music, but I hope their presence doesn’t dissipate the subtle stink of loneliness that Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe generated as a duo. Noon sings with the blank melancholy of a downtown fashion model who appeals to the Wizard of Oz for a heart, then is utterly unsurprised when it arrives pre-broken. Wolf’s smoky keyboard lines conjure an oppressive, mood-lit ambience, a private world for a couple who spend too little time together and too much time obsessing about each other...”
FM SOUND, September 04, 2002
by Jennifer Conrad
"Simultaneously vintage and futuristic, glittery and morose, Parker and Lily have created the perfect soundtrack for a sulky Sunday afternoon... underneath their lyrics that read like spare, sad poetry are layers of all sorts of pop confectionery... Here Comes Winter charts the jealousy-fraught path of a tumultuous relationship, but winds that path through a brilliant pastel landscape."
OUTER SOUND, October 2001
"...a masterpiece of heartbreak songs. Reminiscent of depressed crooners like Johnny Mathis and early Velvet Underground, these 11 tracks tell an intimate tale of hopelessness and heartbreak amidst a glimmering urban landscape. Like a...fuzzy blanket to a bum in the winter, Hello Halo provides a comfort trip to the Holiday Inn lounge in a time of despair. Minimal live and machine drums provide a spacious background to songs composed with reverb-infused vibrato guitar, weeping slide guitar, and a battery of vintage electric piano melodies. Upon this stark road, parker Noon and Lily Wolf's dreamy but raw vocals complete the bleak soundtrack."
SEATTLE WEEKLY, November 23rd 2002
by Katie Millbauer
“New York couple Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe’s sad, sweet songs sound like background music for a dreamy, electro-pop luau. Their cunning (and fearless) manipulation of Moog, drum machines, vintage organs and bossa nova beats give their tunes a nostalgic yet futuristic feel, while Noon’s steel guitar work tops it off with a melancholy island sound. On their latest release, Here Comes Winter, Wolfe’s bubblegum vocals, dancey drum work, and meandering vibraphone make teen-love/angst-pop track “My Apartment Complex” sound like the twisted lo-fi lovechild of Leslie Gore and a calliope. Lovely.”
L.A. WEEKLY, November 26 2002
“New York’s Parker and Lily expose the seamy underbelly of Gotham with tales of spoiled love. Their Here Comes Winter, inflected with ambient sound accidents, is a sweetly (?) melodic view into the loft-bound and lofty lives of Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe’s simultaneously superduper and suspicious loves.”
VENUS MAGAZINE #14, Winter 2002
by MacKenzie Wilson
“a chilling account of the two’s ever-changing, bittersweet love affair... a magical, melodic template of experimental, futuristic sounds... while their debut Hello Halo was a blissful, honeyed take on love, Here Comes Winter takes on a much darker tone. Farfisa organs, vibraphones, and bells are layered throughout. Parker Noon is a sultry crooner, and lyrically he’s a heartbreaker... Synth beats eerily creep around the sneakiness of ‘Separate Rooms’ and ‘Motel Lights’... it’s obscurely beautiful and it works... Here Comes Winter feeds off the negative for an uncanny, brilliant set of songs.”
CINCINNATI CITY BEAT, November 14th 2002
“Beautifully sad clouds of sound... Using chintzy keyboards and drum machines, the occasional guitar and vibraphone, and a great sense of melancholic melody, New York City’s Parker and Lily make delicious, swinging mood music for the morning after ... the group draws from influences like the Velvet Underground and the Walker Brothers to concoct an entrancingly lo-fi pop noir that could very well be the sound David Lynch hears in his head when he falls asleep high”
ATHENS FLAGPOLE, August & October 2002
by Emerson Dameron
"Super-slow ballad style... transcendentally melancholy expression...P&L's tremolo-washed long-player Hello Halo brings back the apple-buttered makeout music of the 50's that rock and roll was never able to destroy. Like the better films of David Lynch, Parker and Lily's art doesn't wallow in gooey nostalgia so much as it's the natural product of an anachronistic environment, worried not at all about being out-of-step with it's time.There's something definitely Lynchian about the blase pop-art narcosis purveyed by NYC's Parker And Lily...It's Twin Peaks: The Graphic Novel, as conceived by Roy Lichtenstein."
REWIRE REVIEWS, August 2002
“If early rock and roll pioneers had adopted sadness as their muse instead of choosing to chronicle the saccharine world of teenage love affairs, Here Comes Winter would have been a chart-topping 45’...gloomy atmospherics, whispered vocals, and lazy, analog hazes... this is music made by the few for the few. It’s a crying shame, too...
THE BIG TAKEOVER, January 2003
"This is beauty and reality and lightness and the dark. This is a perfect movie, a never-ending soundtrack to make you smile as you remember some of the loneliest moments in your life."
BOSTON GLOBE, November 10th 2002
by Joan Anderman
“a noirish, dream-pop gem. Parker mutters and murmurs cheerlessly and plays creepy tremolo lines on guitar. Lily’s humming organs and fuzzy vibes coddle her angel voice. Tiny, tinny beats tap out a barely-there heartbeat for gauzy bossa novas and mutant ballads. They sound like songs on life-support. ...radiant and desperate, “Here Comes Winter” chronicles Parker and Lily’s love affair in all it’s imperfect glory. No fewer than five songs are about infidelity. The rest cover disillusionment and ennui, desire and paranoia. Even the instrumentals shimmer with off-color hues that are as sinister as they are sweet - as if to contain the mess of love in one surreal love song... the result runs the gamut from chaos to bliss. Parker sings... laying out his betrayal over Lily’s warm Wurlitzer... Tense, lovely music... Parker and Lily dot their convoluted interior landscape with mundane landmarks... innocuous little anchor(s) in a sea of accusation and implication.”
THE DAILY IOWAN, November 15 2002
by Richard Shirk
“In the first gushy notes of any parker and Lily song, emotional triggers a stroked as if by a musical IV drip of morphine and chocolates... For manhattan’s Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe, every day is a bed-bound snow day spent morosely cuddling away each other’s infidelities and suspicions, only groggily rolling out of bed to plug in the vintage keyboards and warm up the tube amps to make superficially upbeat bubblegum pop.... plaintive harmonies and 1967 airport lounge keyboards... the expected proclamations of unconditional love are replaced with such lines as “Your kiss is cold as Iceland / and twice as far away”. Similarly, the grave admission that Noon’s only days of feeling alive are “my weekend without you” (“Three-Day Life”) is delivered unemotively and casually behind canned bossa nova... From behind airplane and van windows, (Parker and Lily) are perpetually sleepy-sounding and appropriately faded...”
BUFFALO NEWS, January 02, 2003
"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."
POPMATTERS, March 2003
by Patrick Schabe
"Here Comes Winter is a strange beast... It uses instruments that are organic and warm and produces music that is decidedly cold. It filters a frankness and honesty into something that borders on either cruelty or exhumation when held up to the public eye. Whether these things make for a great listen is certainly subjective, but whether Parker and Lily achieve their aims is beyond question. Interesting, complicated, and disturbingly compelling, Here Comes Winter is another release from a band that has made an art out of airing the dirty laundry of their suffering, placing them in good company with music's history... (and) offering a window into their strange, obsessive love affair. However, instead of infidelity, mistrust, and desire working to create goth moroseness or pained emo, Parker and Lily have developed an oddly discordant twee jazz-pop sound that is simultaneously cheery and somber, sensuous and aloof. With sparse arrangements centered around Noon's baritone guitar and Wolfe's various organs, the songs on Here Comes Winter are shimmering and sometimes carnivalesque, but are undercut with a bitterness that results in results in a distinctly wistful tone... the songs created maintain a depth and ambience even as they seem to drift in from a dreamstate... it's hard not to get caught up in the brutal honesty of the lyrics. Sometimes they almost seem like a slideshow montage of a lover's quarrel....Still, for how blunt this may seem, there is a level of poeticism that is brought out by the music and imagery of these skeletal songs, as if everything is exposed for effect (or maybe affect)."
VICE MAGAZINE, October 2002
by Angel Nelfi
"This New York lover's-tiff-on-record is an amalagamation of Stereo Total and Angelo Badalamenti's scores for Twin Peaks... castoff 60's rhythm machines, farfisa organs... sad and twee songs"
IN MUSIC WE TRUST, March 2003
"Beautiful, hypnotic noise... a symphony for the lonely and desolate... a mysterious album filled with simple little pop songs... reminiscent of artists like Magnetic Fields and Tindersticks, if, say, they could take a joke for once..."
SPLENDID E-ZINE, September 26th 2002
by Patrick Dougherty
“Here Comes Winter has the distinct feel of a night spent in a comfortably sedated haze: charming, disorienting and delightfully confusing in the sense that Something Bad could be right around the corner. Credit the mixture of Noon’s sinister slide and tremolo guitar lines slithering up and down Wolf’s delicate piles of AceTone, Rhodes, Moog, Hammond, and vibraphone textures, lagging slightly behind his mumbled lyrics... The album’s heavy reliance on smooth keyboards serves to sugarcoat Noon’s biting turns of phrase... (and) distant background vocals that would turn Phil Spector green with envy. Meanwhile, the pair’s nonlinear approach to song arrangement adds excitement to (their) instrumentals... (and) hints at the disjointed loneliness of travel in “Planes in Clouds”, and the frustration of cabin fever in “Motel Lights” ...Parker and Lily have carved their own niche with their funereal lounge pop sound -- an inviting, almost camp surface that not-so-subtly suggests something terribly wrong ....Forget the world outside your stereo; Here Comes Winter holds enough musical and emotional depth to keep you entertained throughout the foreboding seasons ahead of us.”
MINDSET (University of Notre Dame), October 2002
"It's the prom moment you never had (or never could)... slow, lusty, dark; padded with wurlitzers, acoustic guitars, and voices like molasses... Paradoxically --but predictably, as any Parker and Lily fan will tell you-- these heavy, sexy songs rotate around a center of infidelity, of physical and emotional journey, of the intense fretting that accompanies intense love...
ROCKGRRL MAGAZINE #46, 2003
by Mairead Case
"Combo organ blends into combo organ, and drum machines are layered over beats. The recording itself is charmingly lo-fi... song following song like clockwork.... Lily's light tones decimate individual words into syllabic sentences ("in-som-ni-ac") before blurring harmoniously into Parker's dangerously apathetic baritone. The combination --undoubtedly like their love-- positively aches.
CLEVELAND SCENE, January 14, 2003
by Brian Baker
"If one accepts the premise that songwriting is therapeutic, then the works of Parker and Lily provide the soundtrack of couples counseling gone horribly --and beautifully-- awry. this year's stunning Here Comes Winter... plays everything icy smooth -- but with soul, empathy, and a noirish sense of art-for-heart's-sake. In a similar vein to Magnetic Field's 69 Love Songs, Parker and Lily have stripped down the overwrought cliches of love's natural mood swings to make their glaringly truthful revelations more palatable..."
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER, January 15, 2003
"Parker and Lily make labyrinthine music -- music that's easier to get into than out of. Simple-seeming retro-equipment bleeps and blurps and back-alley Duane Eddy guitar cover up stories of subtle malice and hidden agendas."
LOST AT SEA, December 2002
“Airy and beautiful... straight out of Wes Anderson films... There’s a good amount of buzz in NYC about Parker and Lily, the Lower East Side trio... imagine Stephin Merritt doing vocals for Tindersticks (and then add some organs).”
TEN BY TEN, Vol. I, No. 3
" (An) album full of sweet melancholy - a soundscape built from larely vintage instrumentation with nods (effects and minimal drum machine beats) to modernity. A popular combination these days, yes, but this is an elegant and evocative version of it. The dusky, moody harmonies of Hello Halo call to mind a slow dance in taffeta in a humid high school gym circa 1956...pleasingly woozy in an ambient wash of reverb, old organs and pianos, and transmittal-from-a-distant-star vocals...the plantive, rising and falling notes of Matt Verta-Ray's steel guitar ultimately ground the album in spooky, lonesome beauty."
FLAGPOLE (Athens GA), December & September 2002
“Though the group’s lyrics can get as poisonous as you please, the music sounds downright lovely.... How to describe them to the uninitiated? That’s tough. If My Bloody Valentine were handed vintage keyboards and restricted to playing at 80 decibels. Or if Leonard Cohen was backed by the Cocteau Twins, playing at a lounge with a two-valium minimum... Each song on the latest album, titled Here Comes Winter, feels like it’s going to be the last one. It’s a long, blissful denouement.... The slow, sultry make-out ballads of occasional Athenians Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe come recommended to all who mourn the slow decomposition of subtlety in this boneheaded inst-grat culture ...beauty is reserved for the patient..."
REAL DETROIT WEEKLY, Sept. 05, 2001
"great music for the depressive soul, the paranoid ones who can't get out of bed...like hot cocoa for your ears...As abstruse as a group can be, Parker and Lily sing about waiting in airports, waitresses and lost love..."
STOMP AND STAMMER (Atlanta), August 2001
"Every instrument on their new album Hello Halo sounds like it was deliberately recorded at improper levels, like you're hearing 'em all play from different rooms of the same dark apartment. Notes build, hover in the air, then recede in the distance while this Parker fellow mumbles like an even more despondent Stuart Staples. Frankly, I think it's a work of art. Matt Verta-Ray's ghostly steel guitar work doesn't hurt either..."
PRIVY MAGAZINE, February 2002
by Megan O.
"Like My Bloody Valentine, Portishead, Mercury Rev, Mazzy Star, or Medicine? Then you best get to know Parker and Lily...deeply rooted in the the art-rock, best-played-when-stoned/drunk/ tripping/suicidal/confused/suffering-from-insomnia category...Touches of dreamscape psychedelia? I'd raise my hand through the haze...This album would make any Twin Peaks devotee weak in the knees."
IMPACT PRESS, Winter 2002
"Like Calexico on the verge of suicide."
FAKEJAZZ.COM, December 2002
“Here Comes Winter conjures the same sort of nostalgia and longing as their first album, Hello Halo... very cinematic, conjuring images of machinery, rainy streets, and flickering neon lights... “Planes in Clouds” reminds me of peppy music from an old videogame, with it’s silly organ and little electronic blips and imitation DJ scratch coming in every so often, but the softly sung lyrics, “We pass in shadows/Like planes in clouds with our lights out” put a damper on things... it’s a welcome balance... Parker and Lily definitely have a trademark sound... It’s a little melancholy, yes, but it’s also sparkly and bright and a lovely second album for Parker and Lily.”
VILLAGE VOICE, October 2nd 2002
“Dreamy, melancholic melodies - a la Magnetic fields - that feel and sound like aural vignettes made for film.”
GAMBIT (New Orleans) , December 10th 2002
“Paker and Lily may have been born 20 years too late... dreamy music that calls to mind Velvet Underground-influenced dream-pop bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s. With loopy drum tracks and an array of analog keyboards to set the texture, the duo sings sweet, sad melodies over slow-swirling harmonic themes... melodic melancholia... recently added third member Christina Campanella brings high-end vocal harmonies and even more keyboards to push their ethereal music to heavenly status.”
ARIZONA DAILY STAR, November 29th 2002
by Rob Bailey
"...strangely pretty funeral-procession music... New York's parker and Lily specialize in what's best summed up as bad-mood music... eerily melodic glimpses into their admittedly mistrustful, bitter affair... Noon's steel guitar whines tremulously, producing a sound that resembles surf music played at the wrong RPM... haunting work... a taste worth acquiring"
INK-19, December 2nd 2002
“very few bands attempting to kick over the metronome and play out their measures in jumbo slices actually succeed. The Velvet Underground is responsible for originally tilling the field, but it’s hard to deny the variety of fruit the patch has yielded -- Low, the American Analog Set, the Cowboy Junkies -- and now Parker and Lily ...still in place are the hissy Casiotone drumbeats, the casual electric piano, and parker Noon’s delivery, which is somewhat reminiscent of a 3 a.m. taxi dispatcher singing into the radio trying to stay awake... this is the sound of time to go but not wanting to leave, the dragging of the feet of the soul. Procrastination put to music... but don’t put off giving this a listen.”
NEW YORK POST, January 12, 2003
"Perfect listening for those cold nights, with it's Yo La Tengo-esque atmospherics, hushed haunting vocals and other mood music surprises."
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER, November 8 2002
“You’d think that Parker Noon and Lily Wolfe have it made: He the songwriting savant with a critically lauded band and his rugged, Kiefer Sutherland sensibility; she the twistedly talented chanteuse... but like the David Lynch-ish characters the pair sings about on their eponymous side-project albums Hello Halo and the new Here Comes Winter, Parker and Lily must have skeletons under beds and in car trunks - overflow from the closet. Insomniacs, serial adulterers, Heartland-traveling nogoodniks -- the populace of Here Comes Winter seems to live almost entirely in motels. Their lives are described in Ping-Pongy, lo-fi drum machine bossa novas and whispered vocals, complemented by murderous vibrato-laden cheapo organ and guitar. All in all, it’s a quiet, almost pleasantly suicidal affair... one of the most wonderfully un-New York bands to come out of NYC in recent days.”
JAMMING! MUSIC (November HitList 2002)
“Strip the Velvet Underground, Tindersticks, Low, and the Young Marble Giants to one or two instruments between them and you’ve got an idea how desperately dark and fragile ex-Valentine Six duo Parker and Lily sound.”
THE DAILY NEBRASKAN, November 15 2002
“On the cutting edge of the New York underground scene... sugary melodies masking dark, often cynical lyrics...”
JOURNAL FRANKFURT
“Paranoid music of broken beauty, evocative of B-movies...”
DIABOLO (Italy)
“Jim Jarmusch would be delighted! Interesting and varied... mood music for black and white films... dreamy, quiet, greasy ballads, sung sadly...”
LO-FI MAGAZINE
“A poetic vision from it’s opening dissonance to it’s
haunting denouement... Although the album has a soundtrack quality, the film has yet to be produced that could accurately capture it’s sheer psychological beauty.”
GIG-MUNSTER (Germany)
“Weird ballads full of stylized pathos...restless, jazzy songs... a stylish road-movie soundtrack... David Lynch, look out!”