Though their press materials make them sound as wet n' ready as ever, Lowell's website informed me that the band have called it a day. It's a bit of a shame, too, because on The Ten Houses and the Falling Leaves, this Maryland-based band shows potential. Their sound is a mixture of Hum and early Sunny Day Real Estate. Emo-tional, inward-looking lyrics tangle with soft acoustic segments, which shift into loud, distorted guitar crunch. Guitarist/vocalist Michael Nestor's voice is often over-earnest, and sounds too glassy in the mix, but he has a slight Andy Partridge quality that separates his performance from the most grating emo singing.

Lowell are at their most intriguing when they are exploring subtle atmospherics. "Yoko Ono Love Song" is a mesmerizing, Joan of Arc-esque number with beautiful cello accents. The best song here, "The Big Chill :: My Postmodernist Dilemma", begins with a dense, dizzying fog of distorted guitar shards and stormy electro-noise, after which the obligatory power-chord eruption feels more earned. But too often, Lowell are content to plumb the stale soft/loud dynamic. If they are indeed broken up, it's too bad they'll never be able to flesh out the more gripping components of their sound.