Minor Victories 2016

Last year SLOWDIVE’s Rachel Goswell, MOGWAI’s Stuart Braithwaite, EDITORS member Justin Lockey and his brother James teamed up under the moniker MINOR VICTORIES to release a really good self-titled debut album. Now, half a year later, a follow-up is announced. Orchestral Variations is a sort-of rework album of the original featuring an instrumental reimagining of songs.

Justin Lockey puts it in the following words:

I don’t really know that much about music in terms of theory, notes, scales etc. I generally just fuck about with things until it sounds right to my ear… So I guess to call this album ‘Orchestral Variations,’ it would have to be in the loosest ever sense of the term.

When we were putting together the Minor Victories album, a lot of the music came about through string arrangements, motifs, melodies, countermelodies and other such noodlings I was messing about with. This record kind of takes it back to that initial point, and re-imagines the whole record from that standpoint–the bare bones, the hint at a vocal melody, not relying on any backbeat–but stripping the songs back to the base elements and then piece-by-piece making an entirely new record. It takes the songs and elements around them and the phrases into a new place, mostly born out of hindsight and I guess a curiosity to fuck around with it all long enough until it sounded right to my ear. From all that an entirely new record was formed. It’s not a remix album, or b-sides… it’s just another way at looking/hearing things.

The new MINOR VICTORIES record arrives on the 27th of January 2017. You can revisit our interview with the band right here and enjoy the two three tracks from it in the form of stunning alternative versions of Scattered Ashes, Give Up The Ghost and Cogs right here.

‘Scattered Ashes’ (Orchestral Version)

‘Give Up The Ghost’ (Orchestral Version)

‘Cogs’ (Orchestral Version)


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MINOR VICTORIES