Minor Victories: Mogwai, Slowdive Members Talk Long-Distance Supergroup
Technically, Minor Victories’ history as a band is a short one. But the U.K. foursome’s self-titled debut – a carefully constructed mélange of shoegaze, post-punk and noise rock, out June 3rd on Fat Possum – reveals them as the group of veterans that they are. To complete such a record through heavy correspondence, without ever assembling the entire band in the same place, they’d have to be.
Minor Victories began a couple years back when Justin Lockey – guitarist of British post-punk band Editors – struck up a collaboration with vocalist Rachel Goswell, who had appeared on the group’s 2015 album, In Dream. Her acclaimed career with shoegaze pioneers Slowdive and spin-off group Mojave 3 stretches back to the late Eighties. Goswell eventually invited Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite to join them. Lockey’s brother and creative partner James filled out the lineup on bass. The Lockeys also produced a series of video shorts – depicting everything from a Godzilla-sized cat to a slo-mo samurai attack – to accompany the project.
Hints of the members’ better-known projects poke out of the resulting music, with a few surprises courtesy of James Graham of the Twilight Sad and Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek. Not just a simple throwback, Minor Victories rivals the most anthemic, challenging and clever work to emerge from all of the principals’ earlier careers.
During a spirited conversation with Rolling Stone, Goswell and Braithwaite revealed that what Minor Victories lacked in face time, they made up for in cat emojis. They also discussed songwriters’ anxiety, why a long-distance collaboration definitely won’t work for everyone and what their other projects are up to.
When was your first full-band gathering, and what was it like?
Rachel Goswell: In March, we had our first full-band rehearsal in Scotland. It was really good. I don’t know if it was Stuart or Justin who said, “Oh, this is weird now that we’re all together.”
Stuart Braithwaite: The only thing that was weird was the actualization that we’d never been in the same room. There’d been so much discussion and chatting that I felt as if we had, even if we hadn’t.
Goswell: Certainly for the last four months of last year, we were in daily contact with each other. Sometimes several times a day.
Braithwaite: Sometimes several times an hour.
With so many potential collaborations out there, what was different about this situation? What made it work?
Goswell: The catalyst of everything was Justin initially contacting me to do some stuff. Justin is a real workhorse. He’s very good at rallying people to get on with things. Whereas, I’m a bit of a procrastinator generally in my life. As we went on and started swapping files, we got really excited by what we were doing. That’s key when you’re doing something like this – interacting with each other. Even though we all hadn’t met at that point, not all together anyway. It was something we could do all at our pace.
Braithwaite: Justin made sure it was in the front of our minds. It just ramped up really gradually to the point where it was something we were all doing all the time until the record was finished.