tiny iota - Indie - Bozeman, MT
*Julia Louis-Dreyfest VIII featured artist
by Jordan Finn
About halfway through tiny iota’s newest release, Hubbub, it hit me. tiny iota is the kind of band straddling the line between kind, apologetic humanism and the sense that maybe it all really is too late. It’s a societal sensation you can’t help but feel in 2022. We admit to each other that we’re probably fucked, but for some reason we keep calm and carry on. We keep trying to be a good person, to show up when expected, and give things the old college try - but why? Hubbub plays like the soundtrack to this question. The trio’s first full-length makes atoning for our sins sound as satisfying as it is necessary. This is the core of Hubbub, that doing right might not save the world but that the alternative can’t save anyone, least of all yourself.
Fronted by Connor Smith on guitar and vox, the rock-steady Ethan Hoerr on bass, and a dexterous Connor Lachenbruch on the drums, tiny iota plays the kind of emotive indie you’d expect from the shape-shifting berg of Bozeman. It’s a city where the daily Californication threatens the survival of the local music scene and musicians are priced out and forced to focus on more lucrative means of income or at worst move out entirely. It’s a struggle between moving out or moving in with the rents. If you haven’t been grandfathered in, making music is an existential crisis in every sense of the word.
This isn’t to say tiny iota is a political or overtly pointed indie outfit. Rather, tiny iota presents itself as a nebulous and moody act without even a suggestion of bratty complaints or tonedeaf mansplaining. Smith’s marked sincerity and hard-won optimism is a welcome change from the ironic and dissociating bands so in en vogue at present. Hip groups on either side of the pond intone that once novel sprechgesang in all of their songs, that sing-songy delivery to the lyrics where the vocalist is too tired or jaded to actually sing a note. tiny iota takes the more difficult path of caring without ever feeling saccharine, presenting themselves as self-critical but never self-loathing. And they do the hard work of keeping up hope without sounding one {ahem} iota like Arcade Fire wannabees straight out of a Lumineers Pandora station.
It’s on tracks like the album’s opener, “An Example” where this dark optimism shines. A sort of minor-key triumph, “An Example” almost sounds like a response to Jordan Peterson acolytes who make their bed but still feel like shit - “Making your bed in the dark / All tucked in / You made it hard on yourself / Everything’s not working out / Just look around for an example.” Evading a shrugging cynicism, Smith continues his thought by way of a chorus - “No need to get sentimental / Use the eraser on your pencil / A little help never hurt anyone.” He does it again on the next chorus with new lyrics and establishes a pattern that pops up throughout the record: the alienated sadness of the verses elevated by a chorus with references to community, caretaking, and “[taking] turns being captain.”
The following song, “Hung Up” steps to a ruminative tempo, each phrase cheekily ending with a brief moment of hanging suspense. What makes the song effectively downtrodden isn’t the minor-key chords or the push and pull of the drums that keep the song from sounding like a downright dirge. There’s something more forlorn about a chorus that picks up the tempo but ratchets up the sadness of its lyrics, “Everything we said / Buried here instead / I can’t pull myself from the grave / I’ll pour myself a cup / I’m still so hung up / This is make-believe.” The most alarming horrors of modernity aren’t the amorphous cataclysms a decade or election cycle away, but the inability to even feel we can know each other enough to survive the disasters looming in the offing. As Smith croons, “Even if I think I do, I do not know who you are,” the sense of an unraveling understanding vies for Hubbub’s most important thread.
Halfway through the record, “Faucet of Love” counters the despair by distilling the album’s anxieties into an emphatically groovy catharsis of love. By introducing the track with a husky saxophone at the album’s second half, it reinvigorates the record with a novel energy without feeling like a disruptive aberration. It’s a jazzy tune, bolstered by Smith’s smoothest vocal delivery and a locked-in rhythm section to dance along to. As a response to Hubbub’s darker moments, “Faucet of Love” parries the angst of the moment with the certainty of love. Even if we might not know who we or anyone truly is, it isn’t an excuse to sacrifice the satisfactions of love and kindness.
A track I warmed up to was the upbeat “Paranoia Jive,” an accurate title if there ever was one. With its haunting backing vocals and bright guitars, it hops jauntily between sections in a Ramonesesque two and a quarter minutes. It’s also a great example of the trickster Smith syncing up moments of the song with the lyrical content. When he sings “whirlwinds blow” we hear an eerie backing vocal creep in, when he ends a vocal phrase with “collide” it coincides with a crash hit and percussive transition, and when Smith ends the first chorus by singing “the twist of the night,” uttering “night” takes the song’s instrumentation from major to minor. And that’s all in the first stanza! Its short length even complements the line “And I hope to completely receive brevity,” indicative of the band’s synchronous cooperation and sly attention to detail.
Yet my personal highlight is the absolute banger of a number, “Atonin.” I literally can’t keep myself from air guitaring the pick slide before slamming into the final chorus every time. Lines like “carried to and from and back into embarrassment” are sung with a galvanizing urgency that rises above the murky soul-searching on the majority of the album’s songs. If Hubbub is a balancing act between moments of meditative kindness or dancing through a world weariness, “Atonin” is all of these things at once.
Hubbub is an honest-to-God honest-to-God record. Somehow, the talented triad pairs existential dread and carefree chilling side by side. Not only does it approach its lyrical subject matter with emotional intelligence - it’s chock full of dancy vibes, kind-hearted poetry, and heady bursts of energy. Bozeman’s tiny iota matches the complexity of the times with richly textured songs that make dancing through your jim-jams obtainable. It might be too late to survive the apocalypse but Hubbub’s a reminder that it’s never too late to keep dancing.