Album Review: Minor Victories - Minor Victories (Orchestral Variations)

Last year, members of Mogwai, Slowdive and Editors put together an album over the internet.

What was built from shared digital snippets, and supposedly shaped as a noise-rock record with female-driven vocals, grew into Minor Victories. Released into the high middles of success, it ultimately lay just outside the expectations of each band member's audience, and Minor Victories (Orchestral Variations) does it again. By not being a literal orchestral rework but rather a ground-up re-imagining, stripped of Rachel Goswell's vocal presence and the vestiges of its prior construction, these variations are exquisitely rendered but vacuous portraits of space without stars.