Despite having outgrown Pittsburgh's student-run stomping ground, the band are adamant about sticking to their roots. After all, feeble little horse started out as just a dorm-room recording project. The plan was to call it quits after graduation, but that changed once their scrappy debut spurred indie labels into a major bidding war.
Girl with Fish is the first album that feeble little horse have released since signing with Saddle Creek, but that doesn't mean the band have lost their homespun charm. These songs were self-recorded at their apartments and produced in-house by guitarists Sebastian Kinsler and Ryan Walchonski – even though one of them moved to D.C. Working remotely was slow going, but all that time swapping voice memos wasn't exactly a labour of love. Instead, this album has the warmth and fuzz of a passion project shared between friends.
Feeble little horse got branded as a new breed of American shoegaze. That shoe still fits on Girl with Fish. Lead single "Tin Man" leaks with rusty distortion that rolls over onto the next track like a ginormous kitten. While these songs began by batting around the kind of springy riff that boings through "Paces", this band aren't another one-trick pony. Drummer Jake Kelly and bassist Lydia Slocum also share songwriting credits, chiming in with cowbell and bird whistles and pixelated synth squibbles. All those odds and ends come together in the form of sticky-sweet hooks, even when they shouldn't. "Do I make you cringe?" Slocum cranes on "Pocket", which is so stuffed with melodic fuzz that it practically splits at the seams.
Shoegaze often treats vocalists as added texture. Slocum can sing with the same shrugging sigh as My Bloody Valentine, but it's her growing confidence that separates feeble little horse from the pack. "Maybe you're not my type, but you can score when it's overtime", she coos on "Freak", an open invitation to a hunky jock that throbs like teenagers waiting for their parents to reverse down the driveway.
But even though this album is named after an inside joke, Girl with Fish has a greasy underbelly. Slocum joined right before recording their first album, and while she still hides behind veiled metaphors, cramming into a tour van with twentysomething dudes made her feel comfortable with opening up around her bandmates. So many of her lyrics fixate on how shame gets tangled up with intimacy. Catholic guilt and the ghost of soiled bed sheets loom large even when the surrounding noise strips down to a tentative slide guitar. "So I'll sleep and go to", Slocum sings on "Heaven". The way that word catches in her throat, it's like she's being swallowed by a panic attack before the band folds her inside a static lullaby.
With an album this good, feeble little horse are bound for the winner's circle. For now, though, the grass looks plenty green right where they're standing. They've got each other and that's a lot.
