Press swoon for Miniature Tigers
All Music Guide
Miniature Tigers may hail from the landlocked sprawl of southern Arizona, but the band's music sets its sights on California, a more appropriate setting for the sun-baked pop songs that comprise this debut...Tell It to the Volcano is a delightfully rare record, one that employs power pop songcraft and lyrical snark in equal measures.
Relix
Tell it to the Volcano is quintessential listening for aimless drives on coastal highways.
Death and Taxes
Miniature Tigers couldn’t have have arrived at a better time. Tell It To The Volcano boasts a collection of well-crafted pop songs, free of pretention and often sung from the perspective of a quirky, lovelorn troubadour.
Daytrotter
The Miniature Tigers are more of a hybrid of the best of the [LA pop] movement, an occasional vaudevillian tone, the soft harmonies of the late Impossibles/Slow Reader and the touching, but brutally honest emotional baggage and concerns of Ben Gibbard doing either Death Cab or All-Time Quarterback. Brand and Schaier slide their voices together to make a conglomeration that sounds like a crystal clear stream with no hurry in it.
LA Weekly
With a captivating mix of quick-witted melodies and sharp-tongued lyrics, the Miniature Tigers are a power-pop animal that’s easy to love.
Popmatters
Tell it to the Volcano is filled with the tunes that lodge instantly in your brain and have you singing along before the songs are even finished...This is fun stuff.
Sentimentalist
Miniature Tigers play stripped-down, simple pop that sounds like summertime nostalgia, warm, comfortable, and fun.
My Old Kentucky Blog
Miniature Tigers play pop music with that earnest emotion (my heart is surely broken and it's all your fault!) that Margot [& The Nuclear So & Sos] brings and blends it with the more upbeat poppy good time sound and solid melodies that Spinto Band always comes with.
Atlanta Music Guide
The lyrics are so charmingly offputting that they can't help but grab attention...That sense of playfulness, of wit mixed with self-deprecation and given over to a killer rhyme scheme, is the thread that ties the album together, even as the band mixes up its instrumentation from track to track.
Spin
Clever, intelligent pop songs come in bunches from this budding outfit, particularly the unshakable “Cannibal Queen”
KCRW
Top 10 best bands of CMJ.
Alternative Press: FOUR AND 1/2 STARS
Staking their claim on the quirkier side of indie pop.
Who are Miniature Tigers?
Hmm, where should we start here? The part where Miniature Tigers stay up all night with Neon Indian, fine-tuning the laser-like synths of their new single, “Gold Skull?” Yeah, that sounds about right. A song Stereogum has the exclusive debut on HERE.
“I won’t forget that experience,” says Miniature Tigers frontman Charlie Brand - who's on Twitter HERE. “I remember the sun coming up and everyone in the room singing along. [Drummer] Rick [Schaier] was almost asleep on the floor as he did harmonies.”
While that part was captured during the Manhattan-bound mixing stages of Miniature Tigers’ second album - FORTRESS which is due July 27th on Modern Art Records through Warner Music Group's Independent Label Group - the rest of the record was tackled at Dreamland, a converted 19th-century church that’s hosted everyone from Beach House to the B-52s. As you might imagine given its location—deep in the woods of Upstate New York—this led to some other late nights, ones that involved abject terror. But hey, that’s what happens when you decide to watch The Shining in a place that could double as a Friday the 13th set.
“That movie put us in a weird headspace,” explains Brand, “so we decided to go nuts on ‘Mansion of Misery’, starting with the drums. We also wailed on the guitars, making everything as loud as we possibly could.” The result is one hell of an curtain-raising cut, as heavenly harmonies and tension-building effects segue into a sudden explosion of crushed cymbals and powder keg chords. So while it’d be easy to draw the usual reference points here (the two B’s: Brian Wilson and the Beatles), something’s a little off about Miniature Tigers’ indie pop presentations, whether we’re talking about the delirious chorus lines of “Bullfighter Jacket,” the hooting and hollering of “Lolita,” or the ’shroom-munching waking dream of “Coyote Enchantment.” And reigning in all the chaos, why, it’s none other than Chris Chu of the morning benders, applying the same widescreen approach that worked wonders on his own Big Echo LP.
“We like to push what doesn’t work sometimes,” says Brand, “and he helped balance that out for us. Chris is also very organized, focused and serious, which is nice, because we aren’t at all.” That’s not totally true. After all, the band’s come a long way since Rolling Stone named them one of MySpace’s 25 best artists in late 2006. For one thing, Brand and Schaier finally have a steady lineup now, rounded out by guitarist Algernon Quashie and bassist Alex Gerber. The band played over 200 dates last year supporting their debut album Tell It To the Volcano with the likes of The morning benders, Bishop Allen, The Spinto Band and then there was the Ben Folds tour where Brand figured out what not to say onstage in front of their biggest crowds yet. “I made a weird joke about being on acid at this college basketball arena,” he says. “I don’t even remember what I was talking about. I was dying up there.” He won’t be any longer.
