Album: Tiny Moving Parts: 'Celebrate' - I Still Keep My Fingers Crossed

When I first stumbled upon this bandcamp page for Tiny Moving Parts I was blown away, they had just released their debut album 'This Couch Is Long And Full Of Friendship' and it was a refreshing change of pace to a lot of melodic hardcore I was listening to at the time. It was full of mathy guitar riffs that sat somewhere between Minus The Bear and The Fall of Troy, followed up by sporadic and yet flawless drums that was held together with simple but well crafted bass parts. All of this topped off with amazing vocal lines from Dylan Mattheison carrying an almost spoken word attire to them with a sprinkle of backing shouts from Matthew Chevalier.

This was all completely undone for me, when they released their next album 'Pleasant Living'. To me, Dylan had taken on a weird singing style which grated and made a lot of the album unlistenable to me - thats not to say it didn’t have great instrumentation and song concepts.

So even though I still loved their debut album and would still attend as many of their shows as I could, I was a little bit over the band in early 2016. Until of course they dropped their first single from 'Celebrate' - 'Happy Birthday' as soon as I heard the line “I still keep my fingers crossed” I had mine crossed as well. The song still had some of the odd singing style that put me off of 'Pleasant Living' but a lot of the vocals I still felt were raw and exciting.

They released a second single and it did the same sort of thing, continuing my hopes for an amazing album. Once Celebrate was released I put my head phones in straight away and sat down to see what this trio had to offer.

On first listen I found myself getting distracted by other things and the album didn’t hold my attention that well, the imagery that laced their first couple of albums wasn’t really there. They had glances of it in some of the lyric work but I felt that there were parts where they had just shoed in lines because they looked good on paper. I was still having a little problem with Dylan’s vocal lines on some choruses but it was eased by having Matthew’s shouts in the background and it also sounded like they had some female backing vocals on ‘Birdhouse' which really helped take the edge off for me.

All of that aside I still really enjoyed the instrumentation, which may have to do with the fact they had producer Greg Lindholm from the debut back to help them craft it, William Chevalier’s drums although not as sporadic, still left me in awe as well as the bass lines which felt a lot more beefed up on this record. As did the guitar when it wasn’t leaving me energized with it’s math style playing and pedal work carrying an essence of ‘Knights’ by Minus The Bear in the song 'Breathe Deep’.

Overall I liked the album, I just wish it had a little more imagery in the lyrics that I know that they are capable of, until then I will continue to keep my fingers crossed for their next record.

Words and Thoughts of Dann Peters