R. dyer - Little Victories

by Zena Grieg

published: 26 / 11 / 2022

Label: Select Label
Format: CD

Quirky and innovative debut album from Brighton-based multi-instrumentalist, experimental songwriter and performance artist R.dyer

Review

Brighton-based multi-instrumentalist, experimental songwriter and performance artist R.dyer (formerly Rebecca Dyer) has released their debut album. ‘Little Victories’ is an innovative kaleidoscope of sound, the singer-songwriter employing a range of instruments from harp, saxophone, musical saw, optical theremins and home-made instruments including tin-can phones. The album shifts from baroque pop through acapella and folk, each song an intricate narrative binding field recordings with snatches of speech. Underpinned by delicate vocals and a wry sense of humour, ‘Little Victories’ extols the stories of the small and minute, from canaries and desks to the commentaries of friends and audience members recounting their own ‘little victories’ with plants, pants and socks and washing up. Songs to listen out for in this eclectic twelve-track collection include the opener, the avant-pop ‘Little Creatures’; the entrancing title track; the baroque ‘Modern Life’ with its sobering admonition: “You never know what you’ve got til it’s gone”; the haunting, evocative ‘Canary (down in the mines)’; and the closer, the second single from the album, the poignant ‘King Alfred’s Cakes’, also released as an idiosyncratic video, recounted from the perspective of an antique desk, a song referencing colonial history and folklore ritual, as the desk struggles to remember if it had been a tree. Quirky, at turns surprising, ‘Little Victories’ is a soulful and intriguing journey through the pot-pourri of modern life.

Track Listing:-

1 Little Creatures (long version)
2 Little Victories
3 victories 1 (journeys)
4 Modern Life
5 victories 2 (eggs)
6 Canary (down in the mines)
7 Raindrops
8 victories 3 (very little)
9 Blaze & The Blue
10 Ifi
11 victories 4 (lockdown)
12 King Alfred's Cakes