Recordings

Tiny Masters of Today
Skeletons (Mute)

And you think your kid is precocious?

Tiny Masters of Today is 15-year-old guitarist-vocalist Ivan and 13-year-old vocalist-bassist Ada, and Skeletons is their second album. Which they produced themselves, throwing a boombastic platter of noize effects onto the garage-punk foundation that the Brooklyn-based siblings established on debut album Bang Bang Boom Cake .

This time around, there are no cameos from Kimya Dawson, Gibby Haynes, or Karen O, but the Tiny Masters never really needed them. Ivan and Ada (no last name) have an innate grasp of form and content, and their songs come off like a mix of Black Lips, the Go! Team, a Hanna-Barbera version of Be Your Own Pet, and maybe an inadvertent touch of AIDS Wolf here and there.

“Skeletons” would be sublimely great garage pop in any case, but with Ada’s unfiltered, preadolescent whine, you feel as if you’re hearing the Kills collaborating with Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm. As deceptively peppy as it is, the words vibrate with those spectral properties of childhood that we tend to forget about (“Skeletons in my closet/They peek out of my closet/Darkening my days/Darkening my days”).

“Two Dead Soldiers” has Ivan breathlessly reciting absurdist poetry while Ada cheerfully shouts out to Brixton, Kingston, and London in the chorus. I’m not sure what it means, but, my God, it’s fun. “Big Stick” promises to take out the “Snobs and the slobs and the critics and their blogs”. Somebody should take a big stick and hunt down any parents who’d choose Miley over this.

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