It is the seasick nostalgia of our childhoods that make these memories both faded and brilliant. Echoing in us like a burned Polaroid, these vignettes still call us to higher purpose, a memory of a self that both does and doesn't still exist. Brooklyn's Tiny Victories bridge easily this type of gap between the muddied reverb of their arrangements and the top-of-the-room choruses that build the architecture of their refrains. On "Gravitron", a suitably spinning melody whips around and around as the hook with double-tap drums playing the dual role of enforcer and sycophant. The final explosion roots in the lyric, "We could think about it", spun round a few times and tossed out dizzy and entirely satisfied.
Tiny Victories self-actualize in the second verse of "Lost Weekend". The arrangement whirrs around them and the snapping rhyme whips, "I know you, you got a stereo heart. You got an ache in your mind, and that's a bad way to start." It's a dreadfully simple way to get kicked in the teeth. The loops and structural architecture call on the recent work of Clock Opera, a simple chiming melody turned into a glittering array of twinkling synths. Predictably, this moment of meta-cognition only preludes another, the crashing conclusion of all these disparate motifs organizing themselves behind the lives drums in a seething final movement. The lyric-less final act proves appropriate for a song about "spend[ing] a lost weekend walking around in your head." Just because the band self-actualizes doesn't mean the listener always gets to join them. For now, they suggest, it will be enough for you to wander.
Brooklyn's Tiny Victories are so low on the horizon that you couldn't necessarily be blamed for missing them. With one song in circulation, "Get Lost Mr. Bones" and less than a thousand views on their myspace, they are just embarking on what seems to promise a bright future. The brainchild of two Brooklyn samplers and keyboard-heads, "Get Lost Mr. Bones" listens like a mixture of LCD's "All My Friends" (to the point where you can almost hear, "you're blowing eighty-five days in the middle of France" in the melody) and the looping, crashing thunder of Dans Le Sac and Scroobius Pip's"Thou Shalt Always Kill". And in this case, the result is stunning first single and a crushing last line, "they've got a million different ways to make you pay." This is a reference to the price of getting into a metaphorical heaven (it also could be a nightclub/Golden Calf). It is a romantic and disastrous vision of New York City, a place we've come to know, and the perfect spot for Tiny Victories.
