Tiny Moving Parts – Pleasant Living

Describing Benson, MN three-piece Tiny Moving Parts involves taking a scenic trip down emo-lane.  Be sure to make note of major intersections for The Saddest Landscape drive, You Blew It! boulevard and all of those twinkling, lesser side streets that you catch a glimpse of out of the corner of your eye.  You guessed it, Tiny Moving Parts is yet another notch in the belt of the ever expanding waistline of the contemporary emo revival.  Still a relative newcomer, the trio’s latest full length, Pleasant Living, is exactly what you’d expect, which as soon becomes clear, isn’t always what you’d want.

But first off, lead vocalist Dylan Mattheisen sure has a mean set of pipes.  Even if his larger than life emo drone can get rather taxing on the ears, it’s hard to deny the rawness of his anguish.  Drawing inspiration from the likes of La Dispute and Say Anything, his regularly fluctuating spoken-word style achieves that “tortured soul” level of internal woe central to the genre.  In his best moments, Mattheisen offers up some emotively descriptive passages.  For instance, in “Boxcar” he repetitively loops, “this boxcar was buried in my head, the gears were turning but I was daydreaming instead” at various intensities as his frustrations take hold.  The result achieves what it sets out to accomplish, but when taken in twelve steady songs of homogenous instrumental accompaniment, ambition soon gives way to annoyance.

Mattheisen is interesting enough to listen to in short doses, but his limitations quickly reveal that he can’t carry the full disc on his own.  Tiny Moving Parts insistence on such uniform guitar work soon becomes a bone of contention for those who aren’t entirely engrossed in the whole math rock/twinkly chord movement.  While no one can question the band’s technical guitar skills, the various guitar tangents punctuating every few words on tracks like “Always Focused” and “Whiskey Waters” are void of that essential variance.  Only on the approach to the album’s end with “Skinny Veins” does the band ease off.  In closer “Van Beers” the Tiny Moving Parts takes a long overdue, increasingly melodic approach that could have balanced the rest of the album monochrome sound.  Even just the inclusion of a brief horn solo breaks up the predictable.  Seeing how this is the final track, it’s a classic case of too little too late.  

Put simply, Tiny Moving Parts is a product of the current emo climate.  Even if Pleasant Living does become a repetitive grind once the general pattern sets in, the band remains committed to delivering exactly what they set out to: an intelligent, off-kilter dose of revivalist emo.  It’s just a shame that the aforementioned shortcomings make Pleasant Living such a tedious chore to sit through on repeat listens.