Tiny Masters of Today - Skeletons

Genre rock Publisher Great Society External Links Tiny Masters of Today MySpace

Tiny Masters of Today are in a tough situation. They’re just a simple brother & sister fronted band from New York, killing time, making garage rock. They shouldn’t have to live up to undue scrutiny, but due to their ages and affiliations, it just can’t be helped. But can they stand on their own as a legitimate band or does it just come off as gimmicky?

Well, yes and no, because it is sort of gimmicky. The average age of a Tiny Master is 14. Most of the songs on Skeletons, as was the case with their debut LP Bang Bang Boom Cake, aren’t so much compositions as they are a single riff repeated for about two minutes. The songwriting just hasn’t developed yet—“Big Stick,” for example, is about beating people up with a big stick. “Big Bass Drum” is about hitting a big bass drum. So people are obviously going to think, yeah, it’s cute, so what?

Which is the deceptive charm of the Tiny Masters—they’re not cute whatsoever. The guitar sounds are grating, unclear, dissonant. The drums romp along like dinosaurs eating rocks. I can’t help but think David Bowie pegged it when he said Ada, singer and bassist, drones like The Shaggs if The Shaggs had any idea what they were doing. But then that voice seems to have been processed through a tin can. It’s a big rock-n-roll mess.

It’s interesting that as destructive of a sound that Tiny Masters crafts, they make sure to respect their elders. Lead track “Drop the Bomb” mixes together the punk noise party of X-Ray Spex or later Iggy Pop while simultaneously throwing in a DEVO-esque guitar solo, like a cannonball crashing into Pee Wee’s Playhouse. “Pop Chart” evokes an XTC style bounce with Karen O histrionics bobbing along to the beat. “Real Good” is pretty much a love note to 60s pop rock, complete with doo-doo-doos and a character named Johnny who’s young, plays guitar, and woos girls.

And the Tiny Masters are not content with rehashing content from Bang Bang, even though there’s plenty from the old album to be heard on Skeletons. They’re trying, if not with complete success, to progress as a band. The most interesting example of this is “Ghost Star,” an almost psychedelic garage rock song about some entity that drives around killing things in his car, receiving the band’s accolades as a prize. Granted, that’s some weird shit, but it’s a large step forward for a band that once wrote “Stickin’ it to the man / Stickin’ it cuz I can / Stickin’ it to the man / Everyday!”

Still, not every song is a success. “Two Dead Soldiers” tries a convoluted story about soldiers fighting each other for no particular reason, adding characters at random, with a unrelated chorus asking the audience, “Can you hear me in Berlin? / Can you hear me in Dublin?” Lead single Skeletons is the only chance we get to see inside of the minds of the Tiny Masters, wherein Ada acknowledges that there are things we don’t know about her, but doesn’t actually try to do anything about those things. They’re just there, hanging out.

So believe the hype about Tiny Masters of Tomorrow, because it’s true, but make sure to look at all the sides of it. Underneath some songwriting issues exists a fully capable garage rock band.