There is a video on YouTube of feeble little horse playing last year in the basement of the WNYU student radio station in Greenwich Village, NYC. The four band members are in a tight circle mandated by the small, square room, the walls all looped wires, band flyers, and a Julian Cope (!) poster. The guitar pedalboards almost overlap such are the confines. The drum kit takes up more space than it should, a tiny measure of revenge for years of shadowed upstage riser relegation.
The band is playing songs from its debut, and what it thought would be its only album, Hayday. At one moment in ‘Termites,’ when the two guitars are ready to rip, the guys can only hunch and move around haltingly like they’re hoovering the dust from the floor with their guitar necks. It provokes more than one mid-singing chuckle from bassist and vocalist Lydia Slocum. It is endearing. The best way to describe it is : joy.
Girl with Fish is the second album from the four who met at University of Pittsburgh and are on record saying they thought Hayday was their first and last, a document of college friends making music that made them happy. But, it caught the attention of stalwart indie label Saddle Creek. How could you say no to a second album?
‘Freak’ opens. This song is wry and horny as Slocum jokingly lusts after a campus star athlete. It also might be the best sub 2-minute song of the year, an important category.
Slocum sounds a bit like Kim Gordon here. There are a few Sonic Youth references that could be made, this will be my only one. (Sonic Youth always left me, not completely cold, but wandering down an alley, slightly chilled, not sure where I was going. Kim Gordon is and was the shit, however, and that band’s engine.)
Slocum is not a great singer, by any means, but an effective one with this music. This is displayed in the oddly pretty ‘Heaven’, where she weights the simple word “to” with a melancholy heft. ‘Tin Man’ sounds like the Blair Witch Project campers survived to play a ditty at a truck stop at the edge of the woods. The Breeders, but they almost got murdered and are playing for a ride home. This song and others have a disconcerting found footage quality, strange bleeps, buzzing and jangles in the background, sounds coming up from a stairwell, a musical rune.
‘Steamroller’, a song about being uncomfortable in your body and baking, will be the one where the mosh pit wakens. But even then, seconds in, when you think that you might be in for a normal fuzz fest, before the guitar can even finish a bar some other sound immediately rides over it, like a boozy soprano missing her cue. I think it’s made by a guitar but I’m not entirely sure, not being conversant in the non-percussive instruments.
“Steamroller, you fuck like you’re eating/Your smile’s like lines in the concrete/Threw the towel in I’m tired of baking/I’m the only one who sees me naked.” Those analogies in that first couplet are not messing around. You can find your own trauma or heartache in them and let the sound briefly carry it away. Or fester. The music gives you that choice.
‘Pocket’ is a batshit crazy song, musically. It starts off sounding like Dinosaur Jr. playing ‘Georgie Girl’ on smack, then goes into a Luscious Jackson rap before really melting down, briefly.
The band does quite a bit of digital distortion to its guitars, so they don’t always sound like guitars, but something not quite identifiable lurking at the edge of your memory. Unwrapped hard candies melting together in a crystal bowl at your loving grandmother’s. You pry one out and put it in your mouth. It’s a pleasing memory. Or is it? That house smelled weird.
I was excited to see this band on its first North American tour this summer. The band canceled the tour, with a heartfelt message of gratitude, citing the need to “reassess our little world for our continued health.”
I worry about feeble little horse. I worry about the youth in America, a country hostile to its most vulnerable. I hope that feeble little horse, and its generation, gets that joy back and overcomes, with anger, the sadness.
When that happens, the teardrop explodes.
Words by Rick Larson
Picky Bastards 