Winning ways

THE IMAGE of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, sitting knee to knee and eye to eye as they spark up song after song, has never lost its seductive pull, enshrined as the ideal representation of “chemistry”, that elusive force that transforms people into bands. Intense, explosive, passionate if not romantic – it’s supposed to be an unbreakable bond forged by remarkable chance. It’s why there are few things more dispiriting than the band who wind up travelling in a fleet of separate buses, communicating only by legal letter and hard stare. Minor Victories don’t subscribe to this compelling myth, however. This record was initiated when Justin Lockey, guitarist of Editors, decided he needed an outlet for those ideas that his day job couldn’t contain. He approached Rachel Goswell of the recently reactivated Slowdive, who in turn drew in her friend Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai. Lockey’s film-maker brother James also joined the project. Even as the songs on this album were being made, the participants hadn’t all met each other, sharing music without sharing space, their connections often only digital. In broad terms, it doesn’t seem hard to track the disparate traces of the people who made it – clues lie in the knotted, muscular songstructure of Give Up The Ghost, the sea-wall crash and roar that closes Higher Hopes, the flickering background radiation of shoegazing – yet it rarely feels disjointed or awkwardly grafted together. The only track that sits uncomfortably, in fact, is the most obviously intriguing: For You Always, Goswell’s duet with Mark Kozelek. On last year’s Sun Kil Moon track Gardens Of Lavender, Kozelek sang about seeing Goswell’s previous band Mojave 3 in Madrid in 1998 (“I was with my girlfriend Marina but I somehow managed to sneak in an unforgettable kiss with Rachel backstage”). Their duet here echoes the record’s pervading sense of missed cues, lost chances, dropped connections – “I remember seeing you at Conway Hall in 2008… I was alone but you were there with that guy who works in guitar shops” – but its conversational delivery jars with the more abstract emotional static elsewhere. “It’s not safe here any more/Let’s go outside,” sings Goswell on the subtle clockwork tick of The Thief, before it accelerates gloriously into the blue in its final seconds. It’s this volatile mood that defines Minor Victories, the manic euphoria of Cogs tempered by the sense that it could spill into chaos at any moment, synthetic beauty A Hundred Ropes vibrating with predatory Rave Tapes aggro. It’s a triumph for experimental chemistry: dramatic, deeply felt, dynamically designed. Minor Victories might’ve been put together at a distance, but it’s all there.

Low-key super-group make innovations in chemistry. By Victoria Segal.