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V/A : Tiny Idols, Vol. 2 (SG-11)

Dagger
Music for Robots
Badminton Stamps
Said the Gramaphone Pt 1
Said the Gramaphone Pt 2
Paper Thin Walls
All Music Guide
The Onion AV Club
Indie Pages

V/A : Tiny Idols (SG-10)

SF Weekly
All Music Guide
Erasing Clouds
Indie Pages
Consumption Blog
Splendid E-Zine
Dagger - Top 5 Compilations of the Year

Magazine Press:

One would expect a compilation with a title such as this to blast from the speakers like an angry teenager. The early '90s, at least as they're remembered today, were an angsty time. It's surprising then, how few bombastic guitars are to be heard on this album -- what little Sturm und Drang is captured. Instead, this is a disc of small, tinkly rock songs by laregly unknown acts. (R. Stevie Moore, the Mommyheads, Allen Clapp and the Strapping Fieldhands are the more well-known exceptions--and how many of their songs do you know by heart?)

The record's louder, more vibrant tracks are the ones that initially stand out. The jerky propulsive chorus of "Kiss Me into the Ground," by Illinois trio Lonely Trailer, and "Big Pink Heart," by brainy California stalwarts Nothing Painted Blue, crackle with exuberance. The Lettuceheads' folky "Open Air" and Eleanor Roosevelt's banjo-heavy "Head in a Hummingbird's Nest," meanwhile, possess a quiet beauty.

Mark Griffey of Snowglobe Records has taken on an ambitious task with this effort, which is the first in a projected series. He wants to do for indie rock what the Nuggets collections have done for garage and psychedelic rock: cast light on deserving unknowns while rejuvenating interest in the time period. Some of these nuggets should have been left in the ground, sure, but quite a few deserved the excavation.

-- Alison Rosen, Time Out

-- Christopher Weingarten, CMJ, Issue #130

Scanning the list of artists appearing on the new 20-track compilation Tiny Idols: Transmissions From The Indie Underground, 1991-1995 (Snowglobe), even the most ardent alt-rock student would be forgiven for not remembering, say, Uncle Wiggly, the Lettuceheads or Panic Ear Service. Their obscurity, says Tiny Idols producer and curator mark Griffey, is exactly the point.

"My main goal for the compilation is to preserve songs that might otherwise be forgotten," says Griffey, who operates the Snowglobe label from his apartment in Brooklyn. "I should probably have my head examined. One of my biggerst fears is that a great album or great song will go undiscovered."

From Allen Clapp's magnificent twee pop to the Licorice Roots' woozy-organ psychedelia, the sound of Tiny Idols is collectively wobbly. Chalk it up to the era's lo-fi recording trend or a production backlash in the post-Nirvana indie milieu. Griffey chose the bands for the compilation based on their lack of relative fame (no Matador or Sub Pop groups) as well as his own experience -- seeing the Mommyheads in 1992, for example, or browsing through his old Ajax and K Records catalogs. Though many of the artsits Griffey contacted were grateful for the attention, that doesn't mean they're inconsequential to the current incie scene: Sunhead became Ladybuy Transistor, Futher morphed into Beachwood Sparks, and Peter Katis of Philistines Jr. is now known as the producer of both Interpol LPs.

Griffey plans for Tiny Idols to be an ongoing series, with a second volume (covering '95-'99) aleready in the works. The obvious touchstone for the project is Nuggets, the famed collection of obscure gems from the psychedelic '60s.

"I sent (Nuggets compiler) Lenny Kaye a copy but haven't heard back from him yet," says Griffey. "This is all his fault. I hope he's brave enough to take the credit"

-- Matthew Fritch, Magnet, April 2005

In the early '90s, every guitar band in America realized it could put out a record, and for a few years there was a flood of D.I.Y. vinyl with little or no interest in the "big time." Assembled on the model of Nuggets, the 1972 roundup of mid-'60s garage rock, Tiny Idols is the first of a proposed series compiling long-out-of-print mix-tape favorites by unjustly obscure artists (Licorice Roots, Sea Saw), as well as a few justly obscure ones. Further's "California Bummer" is the archetypal song here: hazy, headlong pschedelia, with a deliberately screwed-up balance of falsetto cheer and guitar-amp sludge. Too often, though, the set includes a representative song for a band, rather than a great one.

-- Douglas Wolk, Blender

Short-term nostalgists of the indie-pop persuasion should find a boon in Tiny Idols, a 20 track document of some of the most overlooked and under appreciated artists of the early-90s, that would impress even the most ear-to-the-ground audiophile. Like all compilations go, the consistency of Tiny Idols varies considerably, but the emphasis here is on lo-fi, bedroom-pop visionaries that didn¹t have the luxury of wide-scale distribution of their music, let alone their day in the sun. Bunnygrunt, The Lettuceheads, and San Francisco¹s revered Sneetches all contribute luscious slices of jangle pop, Sunhead indulge in a post-shoegazer afterglow, Allen Clapp and Mercy James are singer/songwriter prodigies for the ages, and further¹s distorto-punk chestnut, "California Bummer, is a winsome choice. Amidst these selections you¹ll also find keepers from Lonely Trailer, Panic Ear Service, and the Strapping Fieldhands. My looming concern with Tiny Idols is that it¹s lack of recognizable contributors will make this album a hard sell to the uninitiated. Furthermore, completists already acquainted with Tiny¹s roster might already own these tracks in one form or another, as this comp features previously released material. These potential foibles aside this thought-out, carefully annotated collection is the perfect antidote to those dreadfully ubiquities Now comps flooding the market.

-- Neal Agneta, the Big Takeover