Album Review: Today's Minor Victories by Porcelain
Album artwork for Today’s Minor Victories by Porcelain
The Austin, Texas band Porcelain has released their sophomore album “Today's Minor Victories”. Blending post-hardcore, shoegaze, post-punk, and noise rock in a way only very few artists can pull off with such flow and flawlessness. The album is constructed with such care; the tension throughout the 10 tracks builds through the albums entire presentation. The foundations of this band have the intensity of Unwound, the emotional vulnerability of Touché Amoré, and the expression of atmosphere brought by bands like Hum. The comparisons are extremely high but well deserved.
The understanding of building the uneasiness throughout each track is seamless. They know when to suffocate you, when to let you breathe, and when a melody was worth breaking through from the rest of the destruction. The record itself revolves around the themes of grief, political disillusionment, emotional exhaustion and the little compromises a person makes to continue existing. The album frames survival as a monumental act of a person’s transformation, the band announces they are celebrating the small and sometimes pathetic accomplishments of a person just getting day by day as their whole world feels like it is disintegrating around them
With “Today's Minor Victories”, Porcelain are pushing toward a version of heavy guitar music where the ugliness actually means something. For noise rock, clarity isn’t sounding clean; a surgically placed guitar can mess with the whole vibe and cause friction whilst layering every instrument underneath. Distortion can also lead to the complex arrangements sounding like a smear of noise. Porcelain have mastered the idea of a sound that feels as if it’s falling apart whilst just holding onto enough to keep what’s interesting loud and clear. It's about how that guitar interacts with the bass, how the drums emphasize or disrupt its movement, and how the vocals occupy the spaces that those instruments leave behind. Porcelain's lineup gives them a particularly interesting foundation. Ryan Fitzgibbon and Steve Pike coincide with each other and collide with grace, with one guitar establishing rhythmic aggression while the other distils dissonance, melodical movement, or abrasive atmosphere.
The appropriately named opening track Yarn establishes the album's heavier textures, it’s an opening statement with purpose for the listeners. The entrance invites the listener into what the song is all about; unravelling. The idea of shock and numbness following the end of a relationship, pleading vocals throughout it truly represent someone being unravelled. Rather than the band's opening track being about how angry they are at the world, it opens with their personal devastation unfolding all at once. The heaviness of the tension is formed here through the ugliness of the guitar tones and the hypnotically repetitive guitars that give the perspective of someone walking through their own destruction.
The band takes matters into their own hands in constructing a plethora of melancholy melodies that blissfully play on each instrument. Waltz is where the album expands its ambitions and breathes new life and soul. The slowly built escalation and translating the isolating feeling of depression into punchy guitars and cool melodic finger plucks is amazing. It’s a strange idea of contrast, depression is rarely some explosive, dramatically emotional, catastrophe like grief, it’s repetitive, exhausting, and downright unbearable over time. The patience the track gives to let out its violence at the end is truly great song writing. It builds and forms into a catalyst of noise until there is nothing left but feedback. Whilst a waltz usually depicts a dance of elegance, movements and some degree of romance, here it's twisted into an oppressive force. It's a textured and hypnotic track all at once.
Normally on an album, a title track is the most significant moment in the album. With most rock music building towards an end goal, every conflict needs a climax. With each emotional struggle belched out, the more meaningful it is. Emotional recovery starts here with Today's Minor Victories. Sometimes getting out of bed is today's goal. Sometimes maintaining relationships, surviving the work week, and making it to Friday is someone's small victory. The accomplishments aren't glamorous, but they are personal, they don’t need a massive outcry of cinematic endings. The approach to the title track is in a band blend comparison between the emotional vulnerability of Title Fight and the more atmospheric arrangements of Have a Nice Life. There is a body behind this music, and it sounds exhausted. It’s uncomfortable and truly feels useless. Like the opening track, it’s hypnotising repetitiveness overwhelms until it breaks free from its restraints, bursting into melody fighting for its little victories.
What makes “Today's Minor Victories” such a great start-to-finish album is its use of tension, storytelling, and composition. This isn't just an arrangement of songs, its a story. It might be a bleak story to tell but it's their own. The record's combination of personal grief, alienation, and political disdain gives this album purpose. It’s a love letter to themselves to remind them of all the things they hate and what they truly want to overcome. The lineage of past bands that came before Porcelain is far and wide and has some heavy hitters such as Unwound and Fugazi. They have broken past the walls that kept the noise in noise rock in traditionally. The band’s determination to break through the traditions and deliver such a heartfelt hate towards what they all personally despise is done with such raw intention. They have clear emotional purpose and make vulnerability as important as aggression.
FFO: Chat Pile, Truck Violence, Unwound
SCORE: 8/10
Today’s Minor Victories released on Friday 23rd October, via TODO Records
